Written January 2018/ Set in Brooklyn NY in 1955

The kid looked familiar, but he wasn’t from my street. Not from one block down the hill, and likely not the next one either. I would have known him if he was nearby, either on my block or one of the blocks where we knew some kids and might sometimes walk through. Not stop, not play, but you felt safe enough to walk through.

Uphill there was nothing but a wide divided roadway, and across the roadway the Negro kids.

To one side of the block was the Park, no one living there. On the other side, a commercial avenue, who knew if anyone our age lived across there. Truth be told, your friends were on your block, there were so many kids your age just on one street that you didn’t need to know about anywhere else.

So he must look familiar from school. At school you also hung out with your block, why look for trouble. But if he looks familiar from school and he isn’t on your block, he must be a smart kid because your classes were with the smart kids, the kids who would skip the eighth grade because you could finish that grade in your spare time as you went from the 7th directly to the 9th. You didn’t talk much about skipping that year, though, even on the block; that kind of information could get you punched in the head.

Hard.

Maybe more than once.

He was small, fast, agile, good on his feet, but mostly he hit a hard shot which was not easy. The outdoor handball is small, black and made of tight rubber; it feels like you are hitting a baseball sometimes. The trick is twofold: toughen up your hands, and then let the ball half-roll off your hand, not quite cupping it but more like smoothing its path from your hand to the concrete wall, where it had to bounce back into the rectangular field of play in fair ground to be hit back to the wall by your opponent or, if well placed, bounce off into the corner of the chain link enclosure unreturned, gaining a point for you. Eleven could win, twenty-one could win, but even as kids we played for money also. A quarter could get you a movie ticket; a half-dollar a deli sandwich with a whole sour pickle.

The kid had short crew-cut hair, not much by way of muscles, and no butt stuck out of his jeans. His white T-shirt was pasted to his sunken chest in sweat, which dripped from his nose and chin when he ran. He could crouch low and whip the ball into the corner, or gently let the ball roll off the rough fabric of his gloved hand to hit deep in the court and bounce above his opponent’s head and reach. He was wearing glasses, not usual on the court but no one in the day had heard of goggles and, if they had, they would not have worn them. The sides of his glasses were held solidly in place by large pink protruding ears.

The other kid, the opponent, was bigger, a couple of years older, dark hair and hawk nose, likely Italian with his gold cross jumping off his bare chest whenever he bent or twisted. His friends didn’t look familiar at all; high school kids, the high school was far away, you usually didn’t find kids from high school hanging out in our park, those kids could take care of themselves, they could play in the big-money games, the two dollar handball games, the 25-50 cent poker games, they were old enough to take care of themselves and they ran in packs anyway and went to the big parks with the big basket-ball courts and the dozens of concrete walls where the adult men came to play handball on the weekend and bet ten or twenty dollars a game and they were so good that it was a different game and they knew each other’s names and had been playing against each other for ten or fifteen years, going to different parks on a semi-regular schedule followed by the bookies and their marks.

So this kid, he’s making his points and he’s running all over the court and tiring out the older kid, who was smoking cigarettes before the game began and probably thought this was going to be an easy quarter. Only the kid, he starts pulling ahead, he’s got him 17-13, he’s got him 19-16, he is serving for the win at 20-18 and he hits a real rocket hard off the wall, it whizzes back along the side line to the older kid’s left hand which is a defensive hand and not a real winning weapon, the older kid just reaches the ball and flicks it softly to the middle of the wall with his last stretch, and the blond kid, he has time, he slowly circles the ball as it is coming down and POW he blasts it an inch over the ground and into the far corner where the ball hops up and bounds away and the little kid, he wins!

So when you win a game like that you shut up because you don’t gloat with the loser’s friends looking at you. You don’t shake hands and tell the other guy it was a good game because, hell, it’s 1955 in the City and let’s just say the social graces aren’t high on anyone’s radar and leave it at that.

“That’s a quarter, like we said,” says the blond kid and he holds out his right hand, palm up, the leather center of his glove rough from repeated contact with the hard rubber.

“Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute here, gotta get my glove off and get into my pocket,” says the hawk-nose.

He is pulling up on the fingers of his right hand with his left, which is not easy to do since the glove is sweated up and he is trying to peel the glove off with his other hand which also has a glove on it. Finally his bare hand is into his pocket, he is fishing around and it comes out with a quarter which he is holding daintily between his pointer and thumb, and he makes as if he is about to drop it into the blond kid’s palm when all of a sudden he grabs the kid’s wrist and pulls the lighter boy towards him.

“Hey, guys, get over here,” he shouts, and the blond kid leans back and digs with his heels to break away but he isn’t strong enough.

“Louis, take off this guy’s left glove, will ya?”

The big kid’s friend reaches around back, unhooks the glove and pulls it sharply downward and it peels off into his hands, revealing a silver dollar taped to the kid’s palm with a thick strip of black plumber’s tape.

“Knew it! Little fucker hit the ball real hard. Too hard.” Hawknose glared at the smaller boy and smiled. “You think I’m some dumb wop, some stupid spic, you fuckin’ sheenie bastard,” he inquired at the top of his lungs just before he smashed the kid’s face with his gloved hand. Blood spurted immediately and all over.

“Fuckin’ douche,” he screamed as the smaller boy’s head sagged down, “ya got blood all over my glove, it ain’t gonna come out,” and to be sure of that he punched the kid again and again until he sank to his knees and then fell on his side.

“Quick, go through his pockets, grab his money.”

The smaller boy tried to stick his hand protectively into his right jeans pocket but the other boys grabbed the arm and twisted it behind his back.

There was a popping sound, then a scream that did not stop.

“Got it,” someone said.

“That’ll teach ya, ya fuckin’ punk.” Hawknose bent down until his lips were even with the smaller boy’s ear. “You don’t cheat nobody, ever. Ever. You hear me?”

The blond kid opened his mouth to speak just as one of the other kids kicked him in the mouth, spraying a hand-full of white teeth along with the spray of saliva and blood onto the handball court. Hawknose bent down and gently picked up a few teeth and held them in his ungloved palm, displaying them for the smaller boy to see.

“Souvenirs. Of my trip to your park,” Hawknose spoke gently as he jiggled the teeth in his palm before slipping them into his trouser pocket.

“Hey, lookit, the baby kid is cryin!”

“Well, we can’t let his momma see him with all them tears. Let’s get him washed off.”

Two of the bigger kids picked up the kid and started toward the nearest park exit, the one that bounded a couple of old warehouse buildings. All of sudden Hawknose saw me, staring from behind the fence.

“Hey, you. Yeah, you the faggot with the Dodgers cap. You. He a friend of yours?”

I replied quick as I could, in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Nope. Don’t know him. Just watching the game.”

“Yeah, well keep it that was, ya pussy. Ya got that?”

I turned and started to walk slowly away. “I ain’t even here,” I said, loud and clear and I just kept walking. You don’t grow up in the City without picking up some street smarts, if you catch my drift.

Behind me I hear the blond kid crying and gagging and then the whole noisy gaggle is moving away from me as I am moving away also, which is all good news. I get to the edge of the hill where the land rises quickly and the woods are remarkably opaque for an urban setting, and I take a quick step behind a small embankment and let out a loud fart that is almost as loud as my exhaling. “Close,” I thought to myself. “That was close.”

In the distance I hear a small commotion, what is left of that happy band of sportsmen, and I slip behind a tall maple and stick my head up long enough to see the kid being carried across the street. I have lots of cover and they have forgotten about me. I am drawn in fascination; I think maybe they are going to kill the kid, or drown him, they said they were going to wash him off except we are miles from the waterfront and there are no rivers or streams in Brooklyn that weren’t buried in an underground sewer pipe fifty years ago.

I work my way through and to the other edge of the woods. The group has forgotten me, so I come out of the trees and walk slowly to the edge of the street curb. They have carried the blond kid up the wooden steps to the loading dock of the pickle factory. On the dock is a big wooden barrel where they put out the pickles that are so sour and soaked that they are falling apart. There is a tin box with a slot on top, nailed to the side of the dock, with a sign on it: “take a pickle, leave a nickel.” We would sometimes go over there, take a pickle, wince at how sour it was, squeeze out as much of the spicy brine as we could, and then bite into the green-white flesh. Heaven if you could take it. It was so good that every third or fifth time we would even drop a nickel in the slot if we had it.
So bullshit if they don’t pick the blond kid up and dunk him head-down into the barrel and then start running like hell down the street away from our park and back to where they came from.

So I am staring at this most excellent show when I realize the kid’s legs are kicking wildly, back and forth over the rim of the barrel. How much brine is in that barrel, anyway? Not the kind of think you ever thought about when you were sticking your dirty hand into the cold stench to steal your rotting cuke. All of a sudden I am running across the street, damn near run over by a big DeSoto with the flying angel on the hood, some guy yelling at me but I am up the stairs and thank god the legs are still going.

“You okay,” I ask. I hear something muffled. I stick my head over the edge of the barrel. “You okay,” I scream into the void.

The back factory door springs open, a big guy in a sleeveless T-shirt and a cigarette dangling from his lips takes one look at me, another at the legs, and he grabs the kid’s ankles and impressively lifts him straight up and dumps him on the deck.

“You crazy,” he asks? Then he sees the blood coming from the blond kid’s mouth. “And ya fuckin’ bled into the pickles too?”

We sat inside the door, watched by the big guy, until the cops came. We explained. We were not believed. We were suspended from school for fighting. My father paid the factory $15 over the barrel thing. I was put on the blotter for dumping the blond kid in the barrel even though we both denied it. I got to talk a couple of times to a nice lady social worker who told me that punks who keep lying end up in jail. I finally confessed so I didn’t have to keep going to the court-house downtown.

The blond, ten years later, he was my best man. He is a surgeon in the mid-West. I outlived the stigma of my “arrest” and am a lawyer.

I wonder what ever happened to Hawknose? I wish there was some way to find him. But this is what, sixty years ago, what’s the chance? Besides, what do you say if you go on line? ”Hawk-nosed dark-haired punk with a gold cross who beat up that blond kid in Lincoln Terrace Park in the summer of 1955 and threw him in a pickle barrel: all is forgiven, please reply”?

I don’t think so.

I mean no discredit to the White Owl Cigar, presently on offer in various shapes and fruit flavors for less than a dollar each. But no one has ever confused the White Owl with a Davidoff, or an Uppmann, or an AVO. White Owl is, to my recollection at least, a cigar of the people.

In the 1940s and 1950s, while I do not have an exact recollection, I would bet a plug nickel that a nickel could buy a White Owl cigar. Modest research discovers that Phillies were a nickel and a pack of cigarettes a quarter in 1950.

My father passed away just shy of 101 years, and he was an avid cigar smoker for most of his life until he lost his taste for them in his 90s. Why he retained his yens for maple walnut ice cream and bourbon sours while cigars fell by the wayside is another story and not one that I know; during the years I grew up my dad smoked several a day but, alas, not one inside our house. My mother would not have it. So he smoked outdoors. Almost all the time. An occasional Philly but, for the most part, White Owl blunts.

The White Owl is a domestic American cigar manufactured since 1887. A blunt is, as its name compels, short in stature. I do not have a vintage 1950 handy, but today the cigar is five and one-quarter inches long. Once you bite off the tip, and stick the drawing end into your mouth sufficiently so that it does not fall out when you walk, the cigar protrudes from the plane of you face perhaps four and half inches, probably a touch less, and after a few puffs your smoke is a wasting asset, ending up a mere inch and half long, pulled from your mouth to avoid a burn and held daintily to the lips by two careful fingers to draw the last few puffs before your cigar hits the street or the ashtray.

Why would a man not buy a longer cigar? They might well have been a better value? We are back to my mother.
My dad would not give up either my mother or his smokes, and his work schedule was such that he had lots of time to indulge both. As for cigars, there were those few halcyon days when, ensconced in our back enclosed room with six windows and a screen door, he could sneak a smoke if the wind was right; there were times when he could sit on our small wooden back porch, surrounded by apartment houses towering over our brownstone, and send fumes skyward while at his ease. But most of the time, he was on the pavement.

At the time, men wore hats. In the summer it might be straw. In the evening, a fedora. In the winter, something woolen was most likely. In the rain, something with a floppy wide perimeter. For my father, in all seasons it was a hat with the widest possible front brim. And I means all seasons; if it was pouring there was my father exiting the wrought iron front door, down the steps and onto the New York sidewalks; if it was snowing, there was my father exiting the wrought iron front down the steps and out onto the thin veneer of white fluff that passed for a snowstorm in the City; if it was broiling hot, there he was in a polo, his ample stomach stretching the fabric out, a boater or the like on his head, out the door with his cigar being lit just as the door was closing behind him. In bad weather he would not carry an umbrella. He needed his hands free to adjust and nurse his cigar, or on many walks to light the second one. Off he would go in the night, generally in the direction of the local stores although even then no one except the news store would let him enter with his fuming stogie, no matter how harsh the weather.

The hats might have kept his dark thick straight hair dry, but that was incidental. It was all about the front brim. He needed about four or five inches of overhang to keep his cigar safe. Particularly when it was raining or snowing or sleeting, the awning of his hat was the key to a happy walk. Observed on the street, from a distance he sometimes looked like a thug sent by central casting to appear in some urban noir movie.

There were times I would ask my mother why she would not let dad smoke in the house. Perhaps just one room we could seal off. Was she not worried about his catching pneumonia, thought at the time to be triggered by being abroad in foul weather?

“It’s his choice,” she would hiss. “Him and his damned cigars,” she might mutter.

“But why,” I would wheedle. I liked having my dad around to play pinochle or hearts or to discuss what I was reading or what I did in school or to help me organize my baseball cards into teams or put my stamps into my album.

My mother generally would ignore the question, presuming the answer to be self-evident. But I came over time to understand that it had to do with the carpets, the thick draperies with swooping fabrics overlaying the drops and spilling off the brass rods, the green plush couch, the red arm chair, the upholstered ladies chair, all the trappings of elegance that in her mind made our house an Edwardian showcase out of a middle class residence with lovely pretensions. The White Owl was not a retiring bird; his effluent it seems saturated the fabrics, wormed its ashy way into the interstices of the fabric, and lingered to befoul the air of our elegance and, worse yet, cause the ladies who attended the weekly mah jong session, prior to lighting their cigarettes, to sniff fussily and ask, “Betty, has there been someone – (half beat semi-dramatic pause) – been SMOKING A CIGAR in your house?”

So many the night I sat curled in a chair in the front bay window, half-reading a book selected by my mother as appropriate “literature” or sneaking a Hardy Boys mystery instead, looking down the street in the direction of the stores for that tell-tale red dot in the night, the burning tip of my father’s banishment leading him home, his Rudolf pulling his corpulent Santa’s body back to hearth and child, closer and closer until he paused at the first step of our entry, took one final massively deep drag before flicking the stub into the gutter midst a spray of red sparks, and then threw open the door accompanied by the heat or cold of the night and also by the clinging sweet-sour smell of smoke that, for all my mother’s rules about smoking, could not be banished unless she threw out the man’s clothes each evening and, perhaps, also threw out the man.

“Fa Gadsake, Mickey, will you hang that coat and scarf in the front hall? You’re going to kill your son with the stink.”

Little did my mother know that having my dad back at home, cloying smells and all, was the best part of the evening. My mother would retreat to the kitchen, my father to the hallway, and I would stand in place and breath in, as deeply as I could.

Now that I’m dead I guess there is no harm in telling my story, although I cannot be sure anyone is listening. But it’s okay even if I am just telling this to my own mind, or whatever remains of me for purposes of thought. I also don’t know how long this will last, not even sure how long I have been, well, deceased, so let me stop stalling and begin.

It was one of those intensely gray Boston mornings. The weather was in the mid-thirties and it was drizzling and raining off and on, the sky the same color as the pavement and the remaining snow along the highway morphed into a gray guard-rail coated in road-dirt. The kind of day where you wished it would snow but knew it would just remain blowing and wet. Days like this, the highways are pretty crowded; people with the luxury of an available car and access to a reliable parking place are not going to stand outside waiting for a bus, train or commuter rail, particularly as the public transportation system in Boston was designed without shelters by someone who apparently lived in Dallas or Miami and had only read about sleet without ever having experienced it outside of a Disney movie.

I drive in the right lane. I drive my drive, ya know. Particularly on a bad day when everyone is angry and in a hurry because the roads are so crowded. Also, don’t tell anyone but the right lane usually is faster than the other lanes when there is a back-up. People have the habit of drifting into the left lanes as soon as they feed into the traffic and pick up speed. They are the higher-speed lanes, right? And you avoid the risk of accidents in the slow lane; people don’t cut in and out to pick up a couple of car lengths.

Except for the green Tesla coupe. Pretty car, came up on my left side fast. I always leave a little room in front of me—why not, where am I going so fast anyway? Over the cars in front of me? Not likely. So here is this modest space and this Tesla comes right up the bumper of the car in front of him one lane to my left and, zip, he’s in my lane, and braking to not hit the guy in front of him and I am hitting my brake to keep my distance but, if you drive every day, you learn not to get upset because everyone gets to the same place at the same time, more or less, anyway.

Besides, why pick a fight? It only leads to bad things, right? Accidents, a bad attitude when you get to work, and every once in a while you hear the freak story of someone offing someone in one of those road-rage incidents, where some guy does something dangerous and dumb and there it is on page 5 of the Globe in the morning, some driver in Memphis is shot dead by some nut over a driving thing.

I mean, there are a lot of crazy people out there.

So I have re-established my spacing with this new green car in front of me and I am driving along, really slowly all over, and I start to chuckle to myself because the middle lane, the lane this green guy swerved out of, it starts rolling pretty well and the cars are passing me regularly. Mr. Green sees this also because next thing you know he makes a sharp left swerve, cuts off a car in his old lane, and off he goes with the flow and for maybe two or three minutes he is out of sight.

So I am listening to the news on the radio, particularly the part about a couple of inches of cold rain freezing at night so watch out for black ice on the way home, and I don’t really pay much attention but it seems like my right-hand slow lane is moving pretty well and all of a sudden this green flash cuts me off and slips into my lane and of course it’s Mr Green and his shiny Tesla. Probably saw me coming in his mirror and said to himself “I’m not gonna let that guy who I got in front of back there come along and get in front of me again, that spells failure” and then he likely said to himself “this dingleberry always leaves a shitload of space in front of him, what a turkey, he’s probably some old fart of 90 or maybe some woman, even worse,” but there he is in front of me again. I shake my head; what can you say or do, some people are slow learners.

Not sure how long I have left, like I said, so let me keep this short. Same thing happens. Two more times. Back to the middle, then back in front of me, back to the middle, back to my lane. He’s still a hundred feet in front of me, going nowhere, but he’s damned near killed me and the people he’s cut off in his own lane also. Someone like that deserves a signal, make him aware of the danger of his activity. Everyone in the morning is distracted; who wants to be on a rainy road with a streaky windshield and the big semi trailers waffling in the wind and kissing the lane markers in the wind so you think any minute you’ll be sideswiped.

I ought to write the registry of motor vehicles about this guy. He’s a real danger. I look at his license plate, worried I will not be able to remember it, but it is one of those vanity plates, easy to recall. Good, I stick it in my head.

Just before a particularly tricky part of the highway, there is a patch of fog we drive into, this guy now next to me, and he all of a sudden starts to swerve into my lane. I damned near hit the guard rail and I give him a good loud horn and he bounces back in the lane but he could have crashed into me, the idiot. He needs to be slowed down, he really is going to kill someone. So I pull even with him and roll down my window and give him a polite signal, just to alert him you know, my arm is getting soaked but I am okay with that as I am performing a public good, and I slowly signal him to slow down, I wave my arm up and down, palm down, sort of in a “cool it” kind of gesture. Just to make him aware, you know?

So down comes Mr Green’s passenger side window and he’s this young guy with face hair, thin, nice tan leather seats I am looking at, and he flashes me the universal middle finger like I did something wrong. And his arm is going up and down, up and down, and he turns to face me for a few seconds and he is yelling something I cannot hear but his face is in a knot and he’s red and he’s really not happy with me. And I am just sitting there and he spurts a half-car ahead and cuts me off so sharply that I have to hit my brake, and then he slows down to about five miles an hour for a while so that all the cars behind me are honking their horns, and at the last minute he takes a downtown exit with a jerk of his wheel and a final finger out the driver side of the car and he is gone.

I cannot believe this guy. This guy is dangerous. I know I have long resolved to avoid getting upset if I am driving my car in commuter traffic, but I have to do something. At lunch that day I walk over to the Registry office and fill out a formal report and complain. They will send a notice, hold a hearing, will I be willing to attend? You betcha. I ask his name. They are not supposed to tell me. I look around, the place is pretty quiet. I take a twenty out of my wallet and place it on the desk. The woman is about to object, I can tell, she is putting her hand on the bill and pushing it back towards me and I hold up my hand to stop her and I drop a couple of more twenties on the desk because after all, I am incensed, right? And this woman she stops, looks up at me, writes something on a piece of paper and hands it to me as she slides the twenties towards her. We do not say a word and I turn and walk out of the office.

I can find this guy on Facebook. He has all sorts of stuff on there, including a picture of his bright green Tesla and him with his boot on the front fender with his baseball cap pushed back on his head. Looks like a dumb punk to me, gotta say. I go on line and it doesn’t take long to find his address. I write him a letter, I tell him he is a danger to everyone, and that the police will be contacting him and I will be testifying at the hearing and I hope he sees what he is doing because he is going to get someone hurt or killed and for what?

Well, some short time after that, I remember going to work a couple of days after that and the highway was clear and there was no rain, and there was at least one night in there because the football game was on the tube and Harry and me we went to the Irish Whiskey, that’s our favorite local bar when it’s a work-night because you can walk there and you don’t waste your time getting downtown and then having to haul back when you’re dog tired—well some time after the trip to make the complaint and my email to this guy, I am walking into my apartment house and I hear someone call out my name, “Hey Steve” I hear, and I turn around and I see a green car and then someone with a beard and there’s a loud noise and that’s all I remember until now. Just now. A few minutes ago. Or so it seems. And seems I am dead.

Go figure.

I hope they catch the guy and take him off the road. He’s a real menace to good people, ya know?

Man, there sure a lot of crazy people out there.

Mr. Lederer: And can you tell us, Captain Miller, about the chain of custody for Exhibit 26?

Captain Miller: Yes, it is a strand of black hair that was found clutched in the decedent’s right fist when she was found on her bedroom floor. It was removed by – eh one minute [witness looking into small notebook] – by Patrolman Herman, Louis, Forensics squad at 2:33 PM on the day the body was found. It was placed in the cellophane sleeve you see there and labeled with black marker. The marking code is still on the side. The envelope was put into the police locker for this case and was removed once, on let’s see, yes March 22 of last year and a partial snippet, one and half inches long, was transferred to the Byington Laboratory for DNA analysis.

Judge Hammer: Byington?

Captain Miller: Yes, your honor. 2955 Lockspur Drive in the City. They do the DNA testing for the Department.

Mr. Lederer: Continue please.

Captain Miller: Ah yes? Well they, the Byington lab, they tested the hair as soon as it arrived according to their report, which I have here.

Mr. Lederer: I offer the notes of Captain Miller as Exhibit 27 and the report of Byington as Exhibit 28. [Prosecutor gives notebook and report folder to the Court; a copy is handed to Mr. Wysocki.]

Judge Hammer: Any problems for the defense, Mr. Wysocki?

Mr. Wysocki: Your honor, no problem with 27. I also will not object to admitting the report provided I am free to question its contents.

Judge Hammer: Fine, admitted. You may continue, Mr. Lederer.

Mr. Lederer: Thank you, your Honor. Now, Captain, I direct your attention to the report itself, and let the record show that the witness is being directed to Exhibit 28. Would you please read to the jury the section, the entire section near the bottom of page two under the heading “Findings”?

Judge Hammer: Defense?

Mr Wysocki: No problem, same reservation to cross.

Judge Hammer: Proceed.

Captain Miller: Let me get out my readers here. Ok, got ‘em. I am reading under the heading “Findings.” It says ‘the sample is a Caucasian woman’s black hair strand, undyed, subject likely between forty and fifty years of age. DNA analysis matched by computer to one Charpentier, Juliet, listed in the index as residing in Newton, Massachusetts. And then it is signed by J. Sciotti, Examiner.

Mr. Lederer: Thank you, Captain. Your witness.

Mr. Wysocki: No questions.

Judge Hammer: Captain Miller you are discharged. Any more witnesses for the State?

Mr. Lederer: No, your Honor. The State rests.

Judge Hammer: Is the defense ready?

Mr. Wysocki: Yes indeed, your Honor. The defense calls Ms. Jacelyn Sciotti to the stand.

• * * *

Juliet ran her fingers through her long hair and was dismayed to see that of the five or six strands that came away with her palm, all of them were gray. She shifted on her bench and propped up her book. She had always been fond of John Irving, although some of his later works seemed to be preoccupied with wrestling and long speculations about moral dilemmas that the story line did not seem to present. She was almost at the end of her second run-through of Irving, although the uneven light in the Framingham House of Correction had just about ruined her close-in eyesight, somewhere around her completing the novels of John Gaulsworthy. Wysocki was dead, the associate attorney from his law office had told her during yesterday’s visit. Wysocki knew the case inside out. Wysocki cared. Eight years into the twenty before parole hearings could start, the sentence stretched in gray tones ahead of her, a life sentence of fine literature. Visits from everyone but her former wife Louisa had become rare and now nonexistent; and Louisa was with Millie now, couldn’t blame her, but every visit felt like another small stab in her stomach.

The associate attorney, he was a funny sort, bookish which she guessed was not bad for a lawyer, but somehow he seemed like the kind of person you would not want to rely upon in a courtroom. Not that Mr. Wysocki’s sarcastic style and passionate closing statement had seemed to move the jurors; they sat as if entertained and then needed only five hours to return their guilty verdict. Nor did Wysocki’s appeal do any good, other than require Juliet to sell the insurance policy on her mother’s life, the last asset she had in the world, in order to pay the additional legal fees.

“We haven’t given up, you know,” the associate had said.

“Thank you,” she had replied while knowing that they had given up a long time ago.

He hesitated. Then, “you know Harry told me, before he died, I should try to help you. He knew you were innocent but did not know how to defend you successfully, given the evidence and all. He could never figure out your case. It tortured him. He considered it his greatest failure.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. Juliet did not know what to say so she said nothing.

“Harry said you loved to read. So do I. But sometimes I write. You know, it is a way to process your – thoughts, your issues. Ya know?”

“Maybe, “she shrugged. I never really wrote anything more than a letter, she thought. There was plenty of paper available in the library, but what was there to write about?

“Well,” the young man said, “I have to be going. Do you mind if I drop by a couple of times a month? Mr.Wysocki said he always did and—well, he said it was good for his soul, it made him appreciate what we defense lawyers are supposed to be doing each day.”

Juliet smiled, to think she was a continuing inspiration as she sat in her cell year after year. “Sure,” she replied, making certain to hold eye contact. “That would be very nice. Tell me again, young man—what is your name?”

• * * *

Juliet’s hand ached. Her pens kept running out of ink. It was amazing how fast she was writing, how much she had written. Juliet had become paranoid about the safety of her biography. Tom, the young associate, had arranged with the prison to take the pages with him after each visit and make a copy to be kept in his office, so Juliet knew that her work was secure. And indeed her worry that she would not be able to catch up to her life, and to thus be able to write as a daily diary rather than as an imperfect memory, was beginning to fade. In the three years since she has started writing each day, she had advanced to a couple of years prior to her arrest. Her incomprehensible arrest, that day in June when she was in her garden weeding the tulip bed, Julia was on the porch in one of the Adirondack chairs reading the Economist and calling out quotes from time to time, and a police car pulled up and Juliet had said cheerily “good morning, officers, and how may I help you this beautiful day” and they asked her to hold out her hands and they placed the cuffs on her and read her legal rights off a dog-eared printed card and then put her in the car and would not answer any of Julia’s anguished questions — that day would be interesting to write about, she almost could not wait to get there in a perverse way, tall blonde Julia with her hawk nose slapping the side of the car as it drove away, Juliet slumped in the back seat without any comprehension of what was happening, her summer bra she always used in the garden soaked and chafing her shoulders, her long black hair a tangle under her hair-band that unfortunately opened her pale and lined face with receding chin to plain view, the end of the Js, the end of Juliet and Julia, everyone’s favorite couple….

• * * *

Tom was back in his condo. It had been a hard day. He had been dressed down by the judge for even suggesting bail was appropriate for his client. He had argued that while his client had indeed held the ax in his hands, he had not actually swung it at his wife; Judge Murphy had expressed thanks to God that that was true before he denied bail and sent Peter back to solitary in Country jail and ordered a psych exam before he could be returned to the general prison population.

His visit to Juliet was, as always and against his original expectations, an inspiration, just as Harry Wysocki had told him five years ago. He did not know if Juliet was innocent or guilty, and the DNA evidence was hard to put aside, and Juliet had once met the dead woman, although the State had been unable to identify a recent motive or to place Juliet at the scene. But it was a reminder, the clammy visiting room and its vague antiseptic smell, that he was doing God’s work, literally God’s work in sorting out the sinners and the saints. Just like Harry had told him.

He poured a Sam Adams, grabbed a bag of pretzels and took his attache case to his small desk in the corner of the living room where he did his work when at home. In pulling out the file on today’s case he also pulled out a stack of handwritten pages and realized he had forgotten to drop off Juliet’s most recent pages at his office. Long ago he had stopped reading every page; they were poorly written, with no identifiable style, and although Juliet had seemingly led a reasonably interesting life, dancing in off-Broadway productions and living with a series of promising writers and directors who left their promise unfulfilled on the front porch of fame and fortune, whatever fire that had driven her early years had not found its way into her autobiography. Perhaps she had lost that fire after more than a decade in prison; who could really know?

But his file was challenging and he did not look forward to the hard work it would engender. For a bit of a delay, he grabbed the yellow pages and casually began perusing the neat, cursive script. We were now about two years before the killing. Nothing had been written about anger towards the deceased. Would that come later? Or was it purposely hidden from view, not written about in her private life story, for fear of its discovery? Or – did it not exist, just as Harry had always maintained?

Juliet had just moved into a small house in Somerville with her new lover, an FBI agent named Julia. They had met at an art opening on Newbury Street in Boston; it seemed like a steamy couple of weeks, although Juliet’s description of that time lacked any sense of passion beyond mere chronology. Then one day it seemed – Tom got up for another beer, stopping first in the small bathroom to return the first beer to the great river of life – one day, he read, Julia mentioned that they both had really long hair and that Julia was planning to have hers cut and donated to charity.

Why would you do that, Juliet asked. Why, for people who have no hair, maybe for some medical reason or cancer therapy; there is a big need for long hair. That week, Juliet signed up at “Hair-Razors,” a non-profit group that promised to send collected locks to another nonprofit to be woven into wigs for women suffering from the effects of chemo after breast cancer surgery.

Not unusual or unexpected, Tom thought. Juliet always did seem to be concerned about other people, and they sometimes would talk about some poor soul who was in the glare of the news by reason of some horrendous loss occasioned by a random twist in their otherwise unremarkable lives. “Well, you never know,” Juliet would always say with vast melancholy, no doubt thinking of her own situation as a painful analogy.

Dinner of pretzels and beer over – it was one way Tom tried to control his waist line, with no one to cook for him it was convenient to have a couple of beers and call it a meal – Tom opened the file on his client who had been placed in solitary confinement that morning. Was there any law about that kind of thing being cruel and unusual punishment, where no physical harm had been inflicted or verbally threatened? With a sigh, Tom opened his computer and began to search for precedents.

It wasn’t until he woke up around 3am next morning, impelled to discharge the last of his beer, that Tom had his epiphany. It jolted him so hard that he forgot to finish what he was doing, spraying reprocessed beer over the bathroom tile in his rush to pull on some clothes and drive to the office and find, somewhere is the vast pile of disorganized old case material that Harry Wysocki had left when his heart gave out, the subfile labeled “Charpentier trial: DNA evidence.”

[Christmas 2017—for Juliet]

Herewith, the history of Lincoln Terrace Park in Brooklyn, New York, from c 1948 to c 1957. Why would one care about this history? It is my history, or at least the Eastern-most edge of it. Why would one care about my history? Perhaps you will not, though it also is the history of a slice of time and place.

It is 1948 and I am six years old. It is December and it is cold. I am holding my mother’s hand and walking down the center pathway of Lincoln Terrace Park. It is morning. We are walking East towards PS 189. The sun is in my eyes. My muffler is bunched around my neck. My hat has fold-down ear-flaps which extend down to the edge of my pea-coat. I am being walked to the first grade, as I am every morning, to the dark-haired Mrs. Zimmerman, the beautiful (I think) Mrs. Zimmerman. The teacher who pulled me aside, first day, and told me that she knew all about my being thrown out of Kindergarten for calling the fat ugly Mrs. Saltz too stupid to be my teacher. I told her that Mrs. Saltz was indeed stupid; she did not recognize that the airplane Kenny made out of an empty cookie box was missing its vertical stabilizer. Mrs. Zimmerman nodded sagely and told me that we, she and I, would get along just fine.

My mother walked me to school every morning that year, and every year through fifth grade. When I reached sixth grade and was Captain of the Safety Guards, wearing a white belt with silver and dark blue badge attached, helping cross the younger children over dangerous East New York Avenue, I felt demeaned to be walked by my mother, but that year of liberation was four years in the future that chilly day in December.

“The Park” was the core of my world view. It started less than a block away from my brownstone, and seemed enormous at the time. It had baseball fields and chess tables of cement and basket-ball courts and two tennis courts and green lawns and big trees. It sloped sharply downward to the South from Eastern Parkway, stopping six or seven block at East New York Avenue at the foot of the hill. It was where we played when not on the street, it was the path to school, it was where my father had started taking my friends and me to pretend to play baseball, most Saturday mornings weather permitting, as we stumbled around the dirt kiddie diamond in our Dodger-blue caps and wooden bats too heavy for us, sipping our chocolate Yoo-Hoo drinks to protect us from dehydration and dust.

The geography was known to me through practice; no one had or needed a map. Lincoln Terrace Park occupied a steep hill, with flat terraced areas, starting at the peak along the Southern border of Eastern Parkway and running an overlong block and half mostly between Rochester Avenue of the West and Buffalo Avenue on the East. The Park descended its hill, sometime precipitously for a City park, seven short blocks. My house was on the East end of Union Street, the highest street of the seven; you could see the trees from the steps of my brownstone. We were, all of us, loyal to the kids on our block, of which there were many; I never thought to count them but today, decades later, I can remember perhaps twenty boys, although that is not so remarkable. As of those, seven of us were named Stephen or Steven for reasons of simple popularity; we were none of us aware of any famous Stephen on the world or local stage in the early 1940s.

A word about Eastern Parkway on the North. It was a major thoroughfare across the Borough, before there were major highways or restricted-access roads not subject to cross-streets and stop-lights. Conceived in grand style with a central roadway and a side-lane on each side separated by a narrow strip of grass and trees and occasional benches, it was a palpable boundary to what was our neighborhood. After the end of the Second World War, it became a regular parade route. Every Veteran’s Day, and I think on VE and VJ days, a major military parade would run for several hours past the Northern rim of the park. There were vets from the Second World War, still young and smartly turned out, fitting for the most part in their uniforms. There were marching units from the First World War also, in stranger uniforms and different hats and helmets, soldiers we observed with quiet respect although they did not march with all the great armament of the WW II guys: large guns, open trucks with seated ranks of soldiers and, above all, great grinding noisy tanks, one after another, enough tanks to retake Germany we were sure, and if we yelled and waved sometimes the men would swing the gun turrets for us and we would cheer.

Add in floats and trucks advertising on their flanks local stores now long gone—Abraham and Strauss was my mother’s favorite because they carried pants that were stiff and durable and not made of denim – and politicians in open Cadillac convertibles and, incomprehensible to us, an occasional car with a few men in squared dark blue hats, upright and saluting – soldiers of the North’s Grand Army of the Republic, carried in style up Eastern Parkway along the parade route that began far to the West at the Grand Army Plaza, that broad open space dedicated seventy or so years before to the men of Sherman and Grant, a link to an inconceivable past that over time has come to seem even more surreal.

We would stand with our backs to the metal spiked fence that bounded the Park, facing the parade and paying close attention to the men, the arms, and the occasional troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and High School bands to see if we could identify kids from the neighborhood who were lucky enough to march. Small American flags seemed to appear on secret command, distributed free and waved energetically, their golden pointy peaks at the pinnacle of each flag glittering in the mid-morning sun.

At the Western border, there were no car roads heading into the park; the seven streets that ran into the Park on the hill, starting with Union, all terminated at the Park; Union and President and Carrol and Crown and Montgomery (where my best friend lived in an ample deco apartment house of yellow brick on the corner) and ending at East New York Avenue. On the East, Buffalo Avenue was tree lined on both sides, as a triangular rump of the Park jumped the street and continued, tree-filled and without walking paths, on the other side

All the magic of the Park was either inside, of which more later, or the geography to the South and West. South just across East New York Avenue was our Public School, Kindergarten through grade six, a sea of first and second generation Jewish kids punctuated with what seemed to be a dozen or so Italians in each grade. One of the paths through the Park terminated across the street from the School and it was to that corner that my mother walked me each morning until I became a crossing guard myself, and officiously held out my arms or waved them like windmills to direct the little kids each morning and afternoon.

To the West, the Avenues were named for many blocks for the Cities of Upstate New York, for reasons never quite clear. My father had remembered moving from the Lower East Side to a nearby street, just North of Eastern Parkway, before 1910 when almost all these streets were laid out and paved but with no buildings on them; his father, my grandfather, told me that when he in turn had first seen the neighborhood it was mostly farm land. As you trekked West, leaving Buffalo and Rochester Avenues behind, you reached the commercial center of the neighborhood, Utica Avenue, itself running up the hill parallel to the Park, with its food and clothing stores and delicatessens and the only air conditioned building I had ever seen until I was about twelve years old and taken into Manhattan to see Mary Martin in Peter Pan on Broadway, the Carroll Movie Theater (where upstairs I went to learn piano until the kids on the block followed me one day and saw where I had gone and shamed me into refusing to play).

IF you trekked West then, past Schenectady and Troy and Albany and Kingston Avenues, you finally reached the most important building in our lives, more alive than our homes and certainly more imposing than our school: Ebbetts Field. The Brooklyn Dodgers played here, seventy-seven glorious home games, almost all during the day, often one admission buying a seat for two entire games, the now-long-abandoned all day festival called a double-header. During the school year my father would refrain from work and take me out of school and we would walk to the park and on the spot buy a couple of box seats, five dollars covering the most expensive location for two. There I could see my idols, whose statistics I knew by heart, updated indeed from the very most recent game by reference to one of newspapers; the Herald Tribune, the Post, the Brooklyn Eagle, the World Telegram and Sun, the News, the Mirror – I never saw anyone read a New York Times until I went to College. Baseball games those days were a challenge for a young boy; all the men wore business hats and smoked cigars, and if you sat on your haunches the men behind you told you to sit down and if you breathed you choked. But the ballfield was tiny, you were on top of the players, it was all old-school.

In the summers, we ate from the ice cream trucks. The favorite ice cream pop or cup was the Elsie Bar or the Elsie Cup, named for Elsie the branded cow. Ten wrappers or cup tops and a quarter bought a general admission seat behind a pole. From there you could sneak anywhere. Our streets were scoured clean. And if by chance you did not have either the wrappers or the quarter, you would stand on Bedford Avenue in front of the plate glass window of the car dealer – was it Buicks, I don’t recall and I refuse to look it up because it does not matter, and we would pound our gloves and wait for Duke Snider to hit the ball over the right field wall so we could catch it as it banged on car hoods and nearly but never quite crowned a pedestrian. And the beauty part—you never missed a play, all window opened wide to gain circulation against the summer heat, radios and an occasional new-fangled television blaring the play by play out into the daylight, commentary by the ole Redhead and sometimes that new kid, Vin Scully, who you had to admit was pretty good at it though nothing like the ole Redhead describing to us Brooklyn kids how so-and-so was now in the catbird seat.

Flying back East to the Park, let us dwell on the West border, the street I crossed to reach the Park itself being Rochester Avenue, the steepest of all the streets. Here there was the mythology of place for at the top of the hill on the park side of the street, at the apex where the Park fencing met Eastern Parkway, here was the start of that stretch of history we all called Dead Man’s Hill.

We all knew, as we were informed by the older kids who had been informed by the older older kids, that in the old days the mob would rub you out but that was not humiliating enough to express the contempt that your particular mob boss felt for the lately deceased. No, the body would be dumped in the trunk of some car, no mean feat at the time where large car boots were unheard of since no one really took long trips by motor car—bad roads before Ike built the Interstates, gas rationing in the war, and who had the money or the vacation time anyway? The car was driven to Dead Man’s Hill and unloaded onto the sidewalk alongside the Park. The bets were placed and the bound body would be placed athwart the sidewalk and then given an even kick to start to it rolling. Down it would slowly twirl, we believed. At some point the body would stop, or veer and run into the side fence or a parked car; the game ended and the person guessing most closely how far the corpse rolled picked up the bets.

The time came when we all know these stories could not be accurate, but we told them to the younger kids anyway because that is what you did growing up in the neighborhood – you told the stories and traded the dime comic books and played stickball in the street and played Chinese and Hitting Away and Box Baseball.

And what was the Park, then, aside from the walkway from home to PS 189? It was where we went when we were tired of being hassled by the police for playing ball in the street. From Spring to Fall, during weekends when school was in session, and almost every day when school was on vacation, it was baseball games and sodas and which pick-up team could call themselves the Dodgers. There were handball courts where you hit hard black balls against the concrete walls until you got hardened stone bruises underneath your leather gloves, and where sometimes you cheated by taping a silver dollar to your palm underneath the leather so that the pain would not be so intense. They were picnics with family, cousins who lived nearby because, then, families lived nearby, even in big Cities.

On occasion, the Park came alive with an event larger than itself. Sometimes there were championship softball games or handball tournaments. Sometimes there were semi-pro basketball games. One time, famous people came to play on the tennis courts, not that we kids were attuned to the niceties of tennis, which we viewed our of ignorance as a sport better suited to Westchester where, everyone knew, all the kids were rich and were driven to school in Cadillacs.

• * * *

One day, when I was in ninth grade and hanging out in my advisor’s office, Mr. Green asked me if I played any chess. I told him that everyone I knew played chess; we would go down to the Park and watch the old men sit at concrete tables, shifting on their towels draped over the cold rough concrete seats, hunched over their boards, playing with agonizing slowness, or sometimes with amazing speed when driven by their ticking timers in games of “lightening,” and we knew these were quality games because we could barely follow them and even our block’s best player had sat down a couple of times and lost his dollar with great alacrity to these old men with stony expressions who gave no encouragement but stuffed the bills into their coat pockets and signaled the next “mark.”

“Why you asking?”

“Because there is a player who lives in New York who is about your age and he’s going to be the greatest chess player in history. And he is coming to give an exhibition in Lincoln Terrace.”

“Yeah? I bet old Schmuhl can beat him. He beats everyone.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Green said, “but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Green, he was a crafty one. He never did say I should go watch, because then it was unlikely I would. He never even told me where or when. But that night I looked at the “Chess” column in the Brooklyn Eagle and, sure enough, Master Bobby Fischer would be at the main promenade at Lincoln Terrace Park to play all comers next Saturday. The Parks Department was taking reservations for seats to play against Fischer. It would be for a dollar a game, Fischer would be there for two hours, and they were taking 120 reservations. I told my friends. Sounded like fun.

That Saturday dawned chilly, dank and still but at least there was no rain. It was a typical Brooklyn late November day. The wind gusted spasmodically, and you could feel next month’s snow on your ears as a promise. It would be cold on the cement seats, and cold standing with the observers, but the thought that a twelve-year-old was going to challenge all our great old men was too good to miss. We were also interested in how this would all work. There were exactly ten tables at the promenade; we made it a point to go and count them. There were 120 reservations. My friend Mendez had gotten one of them; seems twenty slots were reserved for people Fischer’s age. That meant they would hold, what, sixty games an hour. Six games per table. Ten minutes a game. Are you kidding me? This kid is going to play everyone for an average of ten minutes a game, walking up and down the promenade to do it? He was going to get slaughtered. We couldn’t wait to see the kid humiliated. Imagine coming to OUR Park and disrespecting us that much!

There were a lot of people standing around when we showed up. Some were running the event, wearing top coats and business hats. There were many adults, and we did not recognize most of them. A few tables had metal police barriers around them to hold back the observers. Those had the largest crowds; we guessed the better players were going to be seated there. A few minutes after eleven a clump of people approached from the Buffalo Avenue end and then they parted to disclose a young kid, dark hair, no hat, really tall and thin. He walked with a slight stoop and didn’t look up. People were talking to him continually. Then a bell rang and someone with a megaphone called out “first ten players” and then, almost instantaneously, another bell followed by the call “commence play.”

A few of us worked our way to the front of the third table, the last one with the barriers, and there was Schmuhl. What luck! He would kill this kid and we would have a front row seat. We called out encouragement to Schmuhl as he took his opening, pawn to King Four, but then someone in a coat told us we had to be quiet so the players could concentrate. Almost immediately the tall kid approached the table through a small break in the crowd that one of the organizers kept open. The kid barely glanced down. His thin hand reached out from inside his car coat, the end of a red sweater sleeve showing a fleck of some old food, a piece was moved, Queen’s pawn, and he was gone. We heard talk moving down the line of tables and then, all of a sudden, just as Schmuhl had moved his second piece, there was the string-bean again. He did not break stride as he slid a bishop out of its rank and he was gone. Schmuhl seemed not to be surprised as he promptly moved another piece, and then there was Fischer again and then again and again and all of a sudden there was a shrug from Schmuhl as he flicked his King over on its side with his wizened index finger and conceded the game, then stood up stiffly to make room for the next player. I had a new watch, a gift from my parents for my Bar Mitzvah, a real adult watch, a Benrus! I looked down. Seven minutes. Seven minutes!? What the hell….

We stayed until 1:35. The event was promised to continue until 2pm but by 1:30 all 120 players had conceded or had been mated by sneak attack to their particular chagrin, not to have seen it coming. The man with the bull-horn congratulated the kid, who was asked to say a few words.

Looking down, he thanked the players for an interesting afternoon but did mention that not one of them had really given him a hard time. A sullen mumbling from the crowd accompanied the kid’s departure, again surrounded by the adults in dark top-coats as they rapidly retired in the direction of Buffalo Avenue.

As the crowd dissipated, I move to a cluster around Schmuhl, who was known as the best in the Park. I only heard fragments, but I did hear “never saw it coming” and “fucking arrogant goniff,” the Yiddish word for thief which seemed to me particularly ungracious since the kid had beaten Schmuhl in seven minutes in a fair game in front of half the neighborhood.

We walked across Rochester to our block, and I realized none of us had seen Mendez play his game.

“Hey, Mendez, how’d ya do?”

Mendez pretended not to hear as he turned towards the entrance to his apartment house.

“MENDEZ YOU PUSSY,” screamed Joel, “HOW DID YOU DO IN THE CHESS GAME?”

Mendez quickened his pace but as he grabbed the metal handle to the apartment house door he half turned his head and called over his shoulder in a matter-of-fact tone, “Fool’s Mate!”

We couldn’t stop laughing.

Joel yelled after him, “What was yer plan, Mendez? Trick him into thinking you wuz stupid or something?”

But Mendez by then was well into his lobby, safe from our sarcasm and scorn.

• * * *

Mainly, though, the Park was a comfort. It was cool and green and it was not like the street. The alleys smelled like cat urine in the summer but the Park smelled like grass. You could play Pinochle on your stoop with your body twisted around as you sat on the steps, or you could walk into the Park and sit down on a blanket or even sit at a table and play like your parents played. You could listen to old men caressing violins and speaking with deep European accents as the sun set. You could see the older kids do things with a baseball that you could not do. You could play basketball, and hope to be a shirt and not a skin because you were a bit fat around the middle, but sometimes you got picked to be a skin so you just took off your shirt and played extra hard.

You could go to one of the larger fields and lie down on your back on clear nights and see the Milky Way, which you thought was a hoax when it was first explained to you until your parents first took you to that field so you could be shielded from the lights on the ground and see for yourself. The Park was the place where the stars came to visit Brooklyn.

And of course, there were the used car tires. After the War, used tires, bald and with their inner tubes, again began to appear on the streets. During wartime one never left rubber to rot; it went to the war effort. But after 1945, tires were a problem, too big to jam into garbage cans and the trash trucks would not pick them up. No one had even heard of a municipal dump. You left them around and they got used somehow or, more likely, ended up in small sparse back yard filled with dirt and a few sprouting flowers.

So on occasion we would find an old tire and we would stand it on its end and send it on it edge reeling down Dead Man’s Hill, on the sidewalk that abutted the Park. Now Brooklyn sidewalks were not designed to be pristine, were seldom repaired, and being poorly installed the individual cement squares tended to rise and sink in their own ways, breaking the initial level surface into a series of discrete and slightly skewed surfaces. The simple result was that if tire made it a quarter of block without fall on it side it was a noted miracle. Random events being – well, random, every so often one of those bad boys would get rolling, pick up steam and next thing you knew you had a new world rolling record, three quarters of a block or, more often, a record expressed in car lengths.

One such day we were rolling a tire, a big one, it must have been from a medium sized truck, and it just slowly gained speed and seemed to right itself whenever it hit a concrete seam or displaced paving plate. After a few seconds we began to follow it, walking quickly and finally running at full tilt down the hill, our Keds pounding flat-footed on the pavement as we began losing ground and as the frightening tire took on a life of its own. We hoped no poor person would exit the Park at President Street or Crown Street and step in from of the wheel and we began yelling out warnings, drowning each other out and becoming less and less helpful at the tire now was about two entire blacks, rocking and bounding down the dead center of the sidewalk.

At the base of the hill, the road took a soft turn to the left as it melded into East New York Avenue. It was a blind corner, as cars took a soft turn to head up the hill. No one told our rolling tired that it was supposed to turn peacefully to the left. It bounded headlong into oncoming traffic. There was a loud horn that did not stop horning. There was the clatter of the police Ford being T-boned by our tire, then veering hard left and running head-on into a bullet-nosed Studebaker that had the misfortune of descending the hill and encountering the police car as it was pushed across the center line.

Our view was superior. I don’t think anyone had a better view than we had.

Well, actually, likely the cops had a better view. And whoever was driving the Studebaker. We look at each other in silence as the crackling of folded metal faded away.

“Shit,” said Mendez.

“Poor fucking Studebaker,” Joel exhaled.

Then someone yelled “RUN!” and suddenly we were running up the hill, which was pretty hard going so we all wove as a flock of birds across Rochester and down Carroll and we didn’t stop until we hit Utica and the four of us pushed into Harry’s Kosher Deli with cold sweat pasting our T-shirts to our bodies. It was mid-day Saturday and people were holding numbered tickets, waiting to be served white fish and derma and knishes and chopped liver sandwiches. Our entry caused everyone to stop and stare; but only for a moment.

“Hey, you schmucks,” said the man behind the counter. “I don’t care you in a hurry, take a ticket and you wait like everyone else.”

“Fuckin’ kids,” said a gray-haired lady I had almost run over.

We all began laughing without being able to stop, and that infuriated a fat lady in a purple flowered dress; she was clutching a numbered ticket and I guess it was a really low number and I think she feared we would disrupt her place in the line. That’s when Harry came around the counter and none-too-gently shoved all of us out the front door.

That sidewalk on Dead Man’s Hill also was the reason we finally left the neighborhood. One day, a few years later, I was in my third year in High School and I had been playing handball against one of the handball walls in the Park and it was getting dark. I got on my bike and started pedaling down one of the paths. When I got to Rochester Avenue, I turned up the hill. Never much of an athlete and always a little overweight, except for those times when I was a lot overweight, my motion slowed quickly and I was just getting off my bike to walk the rest of the way uphill when a younger boy approached me from behind a bush and put a gentle hand on my handlebars, stopping my progress entirely.

“Nice bike,” he said.

Well, he was right. It was new, a gift from my parents, a Schwinn Black Panther. This was before racing bicycles. The Black Panther had a thick central panel between the seat and the handlebar post which contained four batteries powering a rather neat horn you could invoke by the push of a button.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Get off,” he said. Underneath his white T-shirt you could not see any muscles. His jean hung on him; he had no discernable butt.

This being Brooklyn, my lightening analysis was that I was being robbed. Or at least that some ridiculously small black kid, whom I could have kicked half-way across the street, was actually trying to scare me into giving him my bicycle. I responded in standard Brooklynese to this insult.

“Fuck ya mamma,” I replied.

The kid seemed to turn towards the now-dark phalanx of bushes rimming the Park and said in a small controlled voice something like “looks like we gonna have to take it.”

I woke up in Kings County Hospital two days later with a broken nose and two cracked ribs and a caved-in bone at the base of my spine that caused me to sit on an inflated rubber tube for nine months. My mother had already picked out our new apartment in an area of Brooklyn where the blocks had not been “broken.” We moved later that month. My father bought me another bike.

And it was a shame, too, because I had great affection for the Park and we moved to a fancy area with no character and no parkland.

But then again, the Park was no longer the Park of my youth. By the time I was sixteen the neighborhood had changed and, I guess, so had I. My friends and I never went to play baseball any more; we had other things to do. The Park had become dangerous at dusk, lethal at night. The neighborhood fathers had tried to stem the tide that transformed the Park and its environs, but to no avail. One foray into the park one evening with baseball bats thrown over their shoulders, just a peaceful walk in the moonlight to stake out ownership, made no difference in the long run. The fathers had to escort us to Hebrew School at the Temple north of Eastern Parkway to prevent us from getting shaken down by small clusters of kids who would demand quarters and open and close their push-button knives for emphasis.

The tall gawky kid who used to come to the Park some weekends to play lightening chess on the concrete chess tables that lined the central walkway, strolling quickly past each of the ten tables, moving his pieces immediately on reaching each chess board, never losing, collecting a dollar from each child, teen, adult or old man who lined up for his chance to play, stopped coming to Lincoln Terrace. Rumor had it he now was playing at tables in Central Park in Manhattan, but no one would take the train to the City to play against that Fisher kid; you could never win, anyway.

After we moved away I would sometimes get on my replacement bike and come to the Park after school to play handball with my friends, but then you are a senior, you have other friends and interests, you are writing essays for college and then, poof you are gone. You go back once, a few years after college when you are in New York for a visit from another City, and you slow your car as you cruise past your old house and you drive around the Park but it just looks and feels too dangerous, too alien, to even stop. The Park now is a history, warm in the telling but you are no longer of the place.

Today I Googled the Park. I found a map, nothing else. A few businesses using the name Lincoln Terrace pop up; most are not even in New York. I promise myself I will now go visit, take a look while I still can. After all, Brooklyn I am told is now “hot,” no one can even afford to live there any more. I suspect I will not keep my promise. Places are not a geographical location. Places are a memory of you at a given time. You can find the street corner, but you cannot find the hours of your memory. They have rolled and bounced down the hill of your life, gaining speed, causing glee and excitement and damage, and have disappeared around the corner.

All you get is the memory of a distant thud and the tinkle of broken glass.

My father was not your conventional New York City lawyer. Back in the 1950s, lawyers donned suits and took the IRT or the BMT into Manhattan. They arranged their Herald Tribunes and New York Times into subway folds, thin vertical strips to be held in one hand while their other hand grabbed the overhead strap, which allowed them to read in their narrow standing space while swaying with the lurches and screeches as the subway car navigated the numerous twists of the tracks snaking beneath the City above. You did not place your paper in front of your fellow strap-hanger, invading his own reading space.

If the bottom of your paper happened to obstruct the seated passenger’s view, or if you readjusted to balance against a particularly egregious lurch and thus planted your wing-tipped foot on top of some seated passenger’s soft Keds sneaker – well, that was the price they paid for sitting down in the first place.

Our Brooklyn Brownstone had a marginally heated back room, really a porch with flimsy insulation and single-paned windows installed decades ago as an afterthought. This was my father’s home law office. His in-town office at 150 Broadway held most of his files, his secretary and an occasional law clerk, but he was seldom there. Unless compelled to visit Manhattan for a hearing or court appearance, my father donned his baggy dark pleated trousers, strapped T-shirt in summer, plaid shirt in winter, and worked overlooking our miniscule dirt-covered back yard with incongruous apricot tree in the only corner that got regular sunlight from between the nearby apartment houses. Two or three times a week, a Yellow Cab would shuttle files to and from Brooklyn to Broadway.

This office contained several old-fashioned glass-windowed book cases with glass front doors on each shelf that rolled upwards out of sight above the books, a pair of gray metal file cabinets, a dark red leather guest chair cracked from the harsh weather it endured on the porch, and a massive desk of some unknown dark wood typically covered with papers and a thin powder of cigar ash from ten-cent White Owls. Nearby on a rickety metal stand, a black Remington upright typewriter sat next to a pile of typing paper, letterhead and loose carbon papers resting on the floor.

The room smelled mildly of smoke all summer as the windows stood open to create circulation in the pre-air conditioned era; with all windows shut down in winter, the smell was unbearable, leaks of nausea creeping through the closed glass-paned door into the kitchen and ruining even mother’s energetic cooking.

My room was safely down the hall, far enough to escape the odors and the occasional noise as my father and a visiting client would talk and yell; I imagined all his clients, mostly middle-class business owners or truckers, were a particularly stupid lot, as my father always seemed to have to yell at them until they finally understood what he was trying to tell them. I would sit at my small desk next to the radiator, enjoying the warmth, doing my homework or putting stamps into my album, pausing each day to stand on my bed and rearrange as needed the small pennants I had thumb-tacked to the dark blue walls, one for each of the sixteen major league baseball teams, reflecting their standings in the two Leagues after each day’s contests. Over time, the holes in my walls got wider and the pennants less secure through constant rearranging, although usually the first pennant in each league did not change, as the Dodgers and Yankees dominated the baseball world while I was growing up a few blocks East of Ebbetts Field.

Normally clients rang the bell, my dad walked past my room down the long hall that connected almost all the rooms on the first floor, they would trod together past my room on their way to the office in the rear, the door would close with a click of the latch and a rattle of the glass, and other than occasional raised voices I would not be disturbed until they retraced their steps out to the front stoop after their meeting. Sometimes my dad would have a casual hand on a client’s shoulder as he soothingly escorted the man – never once a woman – out the door. Sometimes they walked, my father in the lead, in sullen silence.

One day, however, there was a lot of yelling and cursing that escaped from the office. I recall a very warm day in the late Spring, the City humidity had made an early arrival, the windows of the office were no doubt open including the windows that let out onto the alley that separated our end brownstone from the apartment next door, the same alley onto which my one bedroom window also looked out. That day, my mother was not home I recall, there was a hell of lot of yelling, it rolled down the hallway and was audible also as an echo bouncing down the alley and entering my window a split-second after the sound from the hallway reached me. I could not follow the conversation but it sounded much like an argument growing more intense until, unexpectedly, the glass door was pushed open, its glass doorknob rapping into the wall at the end of its swing, and all of a sudden there was father, as I looked out of my room, hunched over like a crab, shuffling down the long hallway in a crouch, his head twisted back towards his client who had followed him out of the office. As he hobbled down the long hallway, my father’s finger was pointed at the wooden baseboard that ran the length of the hall.

“You know what that is? Do you know what that is? Tell me what that is,” said my father. Silence. He was now half-way to the front door, almost even with my doorway.

“Tell me what that is, you dumb shmuck. What am I pointing at? Tell me what it is.” The client was standing in the middle of hall, face beet red, fists tight. My father stood up, out of breath, all five feet five inches of him, his stomach stretching the fabric of his T-shirt which was soaked with sweat, a cigar stub still glued to his lower lip, his right arm pointed straight down at the floor.

“I’ll tell you what that is. Ya know what it is? It’s the fucking bottom line, you dumb asshole. You understand what I’m trying to tell you? What I’m telling you is the fucking bottom line. You gonna listen to me, or you gonna continue to be the dumb shit I think you are?”

There was a moment of total silence. At first I thought the man was going punch my father as he walked slowly up to him, but when he got near I saw he was slight of frame and even shorter and older than my dad.

“You know what, Mickey,” the man said evenly, his face now pale and his tone flat and frightening. “You remind me of my old man. He used to talk to me like that.” The man half turned and passed my father on his way to the front door. When he reached it he turned the handle, half opened the door, looked over his shoulder and spoke in the same cold tone.

“Ya know, counsellor, I hated my father. Coulda killed him a thousand times.”

In the silence, the door shut softly and he was gone.

That night, after my parents talked for a while in the living room, my mother told me to pack up my school books and she loaded a lot of my clothing into a tan valise that my dad used to take when he traveled on business. I was driven to my grandmother’s house in Queens, where I stayed for a week or more. I missed the last days of that school year, and I really missed my friends. There were no stickball games in my grandmother’s green suburban neighborhood, no kids on the sidewalk playing boxball or up-and-over, no walls for Chinese handball, and nothing much to do except play rummy with my grandma and my aunt. When I asked, I was just told that I had to stay in Queens until some business dispute was settled.

Then one day, just as school had ended, my father picked me up and redeposited me on my block. My friends were there, curious where I had been, but the summer began, the wonderful Brooklyn summer of playing ball, and Hide and Seek, and picking up empty Elsie ice cream wrappers and bringing them to Ebbetts Field with a quarter; ten wrappers and twenty-five cents got you a grandstand seat for the Dodgers and you could see Jackie Robinson jiggle along the basepath and do things we pretended to do at the field in Lincoln Terrace Park. Only Jackie, he did them better.

It was several years later, when my father deemed me able to “understand,” that we sat in his office and he told me why I had been banished to Queens for ten days or so. Seems it took that long for the police to locate and lock up my father’s client.

“He was a button man for Murder Incorporated,” said my father through a particularly acrid burst of White Owl smoke.

“He was what?”

“Murder Incorporated. They did the wet work for the mob. Bunch of guys I grew up with. They were the Jewish mafia. That guy, he was a professional killer. Do you remember what he said, he threatened me.” Another puff, released in slow contemplation.

“Mother and I, we just didn’t want you around until the cops could take him off the street.”

I sat there a bit and then said something like “well thanks dad.” He said “sure” and I escaped awkwardly back into the house where you could breath the air without choking.

I never thought of my father in the same way after that. And I never asked him what he was talking about with his client that day, either. Just didn’t really want to know.

(2017)

[written November 2017]

Muggy nights, I always had a hard time going to sleep. My old room felt alien now. Home from college for a brief visit, the walls seemed too close, the smells too familiar in an uncomfortable sort of way. The light came through the edges of the door to the kitchen; apartments in New York were always poorly designed, as the cost of comfortable design was too great for your average city-dweller to bear.

I think I was half-awake when I heard rustlings in the house. At 2 am, what was going on?

I slowly opened my door to find my father standing across the kitchen, buttoning his shirt. His trousers were pitched neatly over the back of one of the kitchen chairs as he stood there in his shoes and socks and boxers.

“What’s up, dad? You okay?”

“Stanley, what are you doing up? I was trying to make no noise, not wake you and mother.”

“Well, I’m a light sleeper, dad, you know that.”

I think he remembered then; he and my mother would be up late playing cards at the kitchen table, the edges of the cards making a distinct click when they hit the Formica, and with me yelling from the bedroom for them to go to sleep already, I had a big test in school the next morning. They must have loved when I decided to go to college “away,” so they could stop tip-toeing around the selfish sensibilities of their darling son.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I gotta go out.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I told you nothing is the matter.” He looked at me and saw he was not going to get away with the answer. “Okay. Johnny O was arrested. They have him down at the Tombs, lower Manhattan. I have to bail him out.”

“Uncle John? When did this happen? What did he do?”

“He just called me. Good thing it didn’t wake up your mother. She stirred but I grabbed it before it could ring a second time.”

“He called you at two in the morning?”

Dad looked up with a smile. “Yes, he called me at two in the morning. Why are you so shocked? When you get arrested in the middle of the night, you’re supposed to call your lawyer with your one dime. Who would you call, pray tell? Your girlfriend?”

“Wow. This is sort of exciting. How much is the bail, dad?”

He was pulling his pants on with one hand, steadying himself with the other. I was sure I misheard him.

“How much?”

He cinched his belt, some of the trouser fabric gently rolled over the top, prodded along by a small roll of fat. “I said, one million dollars.”

“Holy shit, that’s a lot of money.” Looking back today, to 1961, it was really a lot of money. Who wanted to sleep, get up the next morning and read Spinoza, when people were in jail and their bail was a million dollars.

“What the fuck was he arrested for,” a question which elicited an annoyed glance followed by a single word, “murder.”

“Murder? Really?”

My father had a sardonic side and lack of patience for stupidity, which made it all the more amazing that he loved me so much. “Yeah, murder. Here’s how it works: you steal it’s ten years, you shoot and miss its twenty years, you shoot and hit the guy and he croaks, that’s a million in bail and they fry you. No one can make a million dollars bail.” A pause. “Well, some people can, and those guys call their lawyer.”

I turned back into my room. “Wait a minute, I’m comin’ with you.”

“It’s no place for a kid. And keep your voice down, you’ll wake your mother. She’s not feeling well, you tell her when she gets up.”

I am already pulling up my jeans over my sweaty shorts. “No, I’m coming, dad. Write her a note.”

In a minute I am fully dressed: trousers, T-shirt, sneakers no sox, old Dodger baseball cap. “I’m ready.”

“Don’t you have homework, Stan? Don’t you think you should get a good night’s sleep and do your homework. You need to get the grades to go to law school.”

“Dad, I told you I’m not going to law school and this is exciting, I’m not going to miss this.”

And so we are in my father’s big grey Buick Roadmaster, with those big ugly fins and bench seats wide enough for four people, and all of a sudden I realize we are driving on the Belt Parkway and we are going East, away from Manhattan.

“Dad, you made a wrong turn, you’re headed out to the Island.”

“No, it’s okay, that’s where we’re going first.”

“Dad, why are we going to the Island when Uncle Johnny is in jail in Manhattan?”

Now he was really grinning, the grin visible weirdly in the greenish glow from the impressive instrument panel with all those extra dials for RPMs and FM radio and new air conditioning, all those things that had boosted the cost of our shiny Buick all the way up to four grand.

“Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Guess what? When the call came in and I looked in my wallet I said to myself, Joseph, I said, will ya look at that? You shoulda gone to the bank today like you intended. Because you don’t have a million dollars in your wallet so what are you gonna do about that?”

Never occurred to me. “Hey, dad, so what are we going to do?”

“I called ahead to Johnny’s house. Well pick up the money there and go into the City.”

“Oh, okay,” I thought to myself and a minute later it occurred to me that not a lot of people had a million dollars sitting around their houses and I was about to ask when I remembered about Uncle Johnny and his house about half the size of our apartment building, with the security gate out front with always a man in the booth, and the interminable green lawn sloping all the way down to the Long Island Sound which seemed a million miles away, and I thought to myself that, yeah, would not surprise me if Johnny O had a million or so lying around the house, just in case he decided to buy another boat or fly to Italy or, well, just decide to shoot somebody and get arrested.

A half hour later we pulled up to the gate, which was still closed, but there were five or six men standing behind it, which was odd but then again visits to Uncle Johnny always were — different. One of the men slipped out between the fences, which opened for a moment, and stepped towards the back door of our car.

“Just don’t sit there, Stan. Open the door lock.”

“What? Wait, sorry.” I twisted around and pulled the locking pin up. The man stepped silently into the back seat. He was carrying a small dark leather satchel which he placed on the seat beside him. The seat depressed a good deal; the bag must have been pretty heavy, I thought.

All of a sudden the car was moving. There was no discussion, no one had said a word. It was all awkward, so I turned around and stuck out my hand. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Stan and this is my….”

“Shut up, will you, Stan?” It was my father’s voice, a bit loud I thought and clearly full of annoyance.

I turned my head, my body still twisted towards the back seat, arm extended and not yet shaken.

“Stanley, just turn around and face front and forget about the man in the back, will you?”

I looked over at my dad, who gave his head a jerk, back to front, just to make sure I had understood which way he wanted me to move. In the glare of an oncoming headlight, to this day I can swear that he was rolling his eyes upwards because of my gaffe.

So for forty-five minutes we drove in total silence. There were few cars on the road. We came over the Queensborough Bridge, never so empty as at almost four in the morning, and zoomed downtown, pulling up in front of a dirty grey building that could only be either a prison or a New York City public school. My dad stopped under the “No Standing” sign. I guess he then realized it was going to be strange to just leave me in the car alone, although at this point I had no idea what to expect.

“So how about you go inside and make bail,” he asked as casually as if he were asking me if I wanted another pickle with my pastrami on rye.

“What do you mean,” I heard myself ask, devoid still of comprehension.

“What I mean is I want you to step out of the car. The gentleman will hand you the satchel. You will walk through those two doors right there, and turn right, and go up a few steps, and you will come to another set of swinging doors. You will walk through those doors and you will see a desk with a policeman behind it. You will tell him why you are there, and he will ask you for the money and you will give it to him, and you will wait. When Johnny comes into the room, you will not say anything. You will then turn and walk out with him.” He paused, and then that same grin. “And you need not tell Johnny what to do, he will know it will be time to go.”

I managed an “uh-huh,” or at least I think I did, and stepped out into the waning night. Somewhere the sky was beginning to lighten, but in the City you never could tell directions, the buildings always blocked the geography, you just got the light or the dark or the rain or the shine down on the street, coming between the towers from some location you did not know.

Our passenger stepped out of the back of our car and held out the bag, which I took. I was afraid to say “thank you,” and my silence seemed to be the wise choice as he silently turned away and walked slowly down the street towards Broadway without looking back.

I turned towards the building, and sensed my father waving his hand at me, pointing in the direction of the doors. Sure enough, in the first set, right turn, four steps, more doors, and then an incredibly bright room, neons hanging in profusion from the ceiling, and straight in front of me a very tall desk, dark wood, and a fat policeman sitting on what must have been a high stool behind it.

He ignored me, which was strange as the place was totally empty and still. I waited. I cleared my throat. I was obviously doing this incorrectly. “Excuse me, officer,” I croaked. My voice was cracky and high, not the tone I had hoped to convey.

“Yeah, kid, whaddaya want?” I did not earn his looking up. He seemed to be reading something, although perhaps he was just studiously disrespecting me. It occurred to me I should have thrown on a suit jacket before leaving my bedroom, but it was a bit later for that now.

“I’m here to bail out Johnny O,” I said with confidence.

“One million,” he replied, as if asking for a ten-spot. He still had not favored me with his gaze. All I saw was the top of his cap, and the pink jowls of his lower face.

I reached up, holding the black leather case. It was very heavy, it took all of my strength to lift it a couple of feet upwards.

“Fa Chrissake,” he said, finally looking in my general direction, “take the fuckin’ money outta the bag, will ya?” Apparently, I was so inept that I could not even manage to give someone a million dollars in cash at four am without screwing it up.

Speechless, I fussed with the clasps, there were two, and put the case on the floor as I could not really hold it up and deal with the neat clumps of bills. I reached into the case, bent at the waist, grabbed two handfuls of money, reached up to my eye-level to place them neatly on the top of the desk, bent and repeat, bent and repeat, my back and arms began to hurt, God there were a lot of bills to add up to a million dollars I thought and then thought well that’s no surprise is it, bent and repeat, bent and repeat, until finally the case was empty.

“That’s it,” I sighed, not even aware I was intending to speak.

The policeman stood. He looked old, really old, with a short white mustache, several chins, and what looked like female breasts underneath his sweaty shirt; the room was still and hot and he was not handling the heat very well. He swept the money off the desk with his forearm, and I could hear it dropping with successive thumps into a drawer. Then I heard another drawer open and the same thump-thump. I guess desk drawers in police stations hold about five hundred thousand each, they were not built for the bail for Johnny O.

I fought down an urge to ask him why he hadn’t counted it. I guess people like Johnny O are stand-up. They don’t chisel you on the bail money, I guess. What did I know? I was still in college….

I heard a rotary phone being dialed; three numbers, then an audible tinny ring. “Yeah, Hogan here. Bring the Guinea up, he’s been bailed.”

He looked up. “Sit down, kid. You makin’ me nervous.” He waved towards a wooden bench a few yards away where I sat for what seemed like forever.

Then a door opened at the other end of room and out walked my Uncle Johnny. One thing about Uncle Johnny, he always was well dressed. In fact, long time ago I asked him about his suits and jackets, I was just a kid but even then I thought his clothes were “unusual,” and he showed me some different fabrics up in his massive bedroom, you could walk into his closet, it was bigger than my bedroom at home, and showed me what hand-stitching looked like, I had never even known there were different ways to sew a suit but I saw that all my own clothing was not sewn like Uncle Johnny’s.

Johnny was wearing a blue pinstripe suit, alligator belt, pointy loafers, silk shirt, no tie. The usual, now that I think about it, but at the time all I could think of was that most people never in their lives looked that nice, forget about just stepping out of jail.

“Hiya, kiddo,” he said, and gently raised me from the bench and gave me a friendly push towards the door. ‘’

“See ya soon,” said the policeman as we reached the door.

“Fuck ya mother,” allowed Johnny O, all in his usual even voice, throwing the remark over his shoulder as the inner doors swung shut.

We walked without talking to the car; I was afraid to say anything and Johnny was not in the mood for chit-chat. Instinctively I opened the front door for him and Johnny sat right down in my old seat. I slid into the back. My dad rolled away from the curb.

“Rat, bastard douchebag,” said my Uncle.

“Later,” said my father.

And we drove down to the ocean, over near Floyd Bennett Field, before it was renamed Kennedy International, before the President was shot and eligible to have big things named after him, and no one said a word, and my Uncle’s head lolled back on the headrest and I could swear he started to snore, the gentle snore of the righteous.

Johnny awoke with the bump into the parking lot of a silver-bodied diner with a near-empty macadam parking lot, the shadow of the diner casting a long rectangle of deeper blackness.

“Good, I’m hungry.” Johnny stretched his short arms in front of him, then reached for his door.

“Me, too,” said my father, who was always hungry.

Wordlessly I opened my back door and was half-way out when my father walked around the car and looked down at me.

“Stay put,” he said.

“I’m hungry.”

“Just stay in the car, please. I have to talk to my client, and that has to be confidential. You can’t be there.”

I collapsed back into the seat and my father was gently closing the door when Johnny O’s head appeared. “Relax, Stan m’ man,” said Johnny O. “We gonna take care of you. You, you’re a real nice kid, ya know.”

“Thank you, Uncle Johnny,” came out of my mouth. He reached in and patted me on the cheek.

“Real nice kid,” he said with a smile, and then the door closed and I was sitting in a parking lot, in a dark car, all alone, with the sun now glinting over the reeds at the edge of the ocean, and a couple of gulls strutting over the pavement, pecking at what was left on the ground.

I must have dozed off but was awakened by a knock on my window. I looked out and two waitresses with little caps were standing outside, each holding a tray. I jumped out and handed the food onto the back seat.

“You got eggs scrambled, bacon, sausage. You got a bagel, rye toast, toasted English. Ya got a short stack of blueberry pancakes. You also got cheese blintzes, coffee, juice, chocolate milk.”

I just stared. Then I broke out in a big smile.

The other waitress smiled back. “The guy in the nice suit? He said you wanted to be alone but were hungry and didn’t know what you wanted so he ordered you all of this stuff. Said it was fine, you were a nice kid.”

I’m sure I sort of beamed, standing there with the two of them staring at my back seat full of all that food, coffee cup on the floor so it wouldn’t spill, napkins and utensils all over place.

I turned to the two of them and said a simple “thanks.” They looked at each other, giggled, and the pretty one said “And he gave me five dollars to do this” and she leaned towards me and gave me huge wet kiss on the mouth.

I watched their backsides hustle back to the diner, turned and began to figure out how to eat all that food. In the window of the diner, I saw my father and Uncle Johnny talking at their table.

What I did not know at the time was that Johnny O was going away for the rest of his life.

But he was always okay by me.

[Events depicted here are substantially accurate. The time frames are 1958 and 2009. As of this writing, Brooklyn had been through a metamorphosis since 1958. And as can be seen from the different sensibilities in the two parts of the story, so has our society. Written 10-17]

Louie lumbered up the flight of stairs to the restaurant’s “banquet room.” He was late for lunch, but not (he was sure) for the program and the socializing afterwards. Louie no longer hurried up stairways; his paunch was hidden by the fully cut shirts and Mario’s expert tailoring, but underneath the hand-stitching and carefully selected Italian cloth, not too clingy and not easily wrinkled, lurked a fold of fat from which hung, these days, a smaller but discrete additional fold of fat, all of which seemed directly connected to and interfering with his wind-pipe.

“Fucking fiftieth reunion,” he muttered between heavy exhalations; at least they could have met in one of those new restaurants on the waterfront, with the views of Manhattan across the River and modern elevators for the people who—well, were having their fiftieth High School reunion.

At the head of the stairs, a large bulletin board still had a few name cards, with table numbers, pinned to the green felt. Most of the people were already inside, but Louie found his name among a group of remaining, unfamiliar attendees. Hope I’m sitting with Joel and Steve, he thought; Joel particularly, he got me on an airplane from Boston to attend this goddamned thing in the bowels of Brooklyn, near the old school in a space that had once been a fine restaurant, then a shuttered relic surrounded by slums and violence, and now again a restaurant but still in the wrong part of town to be written up in the New Yorker.

“Hold up,” said a small voice. “Put on your pin!”

A trim blonde with a bit too few lines on her face emerged from the room and waved her hand at a second table, on which were several large pins, each with a photograph of an attendee taken from the senior class yearbook. Louie winced, avoided eye contact, and picked up his pin. His younger self, framed by an unfortunate paisley patterned shirt, reminded him of many things, most of them unpleasant.

“Noooo,” said the voice with sudden animation. “Louie?” A big smile. “I never would have recognized you in a million years. I think it’s the beard. You guys can hide behind your beards, we girls just have to put it all out there for everyone to see.”

“Well, you handled that with some plastic surgery, I bet,” he thought to himself as he looked square at the woman, guessing where the stiches were hidden.

Louie thought it was Myra, some last name forgotten for the moment, very Jewish, big breasts and tight sweaters came to mind. But what if he was wrong?

“I know you, but I’m afraid I will insult you with a wrong name.”
“You and me both, Louie. We do tend to forget, don’t we?” Slight pause, then “Myra! Myra Krakow. Well now, Krakow. Myra Rabinowitz!” With that, a gentle downward pull on his shoulder, followed by a solid kiss on the cheek.

“Myra! So good to see you,” he blurted, then was embarrassed. Trying to regain his poise, Louie tried some of the charm he had picked up in life which was sorely lacking in his teens.
“And not only do you look great, but you have no idea how I would have appreciated a kiss like that fifty years ago!”

“Oh, you always were a smooth talker,” said Myra with an even broader grin. Louie was sure her memory had him confused with some other teen, but went with the flow.

“Thanks,” he said, affecting an abashed karma.

“So come in, come in, almost everyone is here, we’re about to sit down, I have to help get everyone in their seats,” and Myra gently touched a large red ribbon pinned to her collar: “Welcoming Committee.” “I see you’re at table 15, not my table, but come over why don’t you, table 11, you can meet Harry. Harry Krakow! He was a year ahead of us. We can talk.”

And then she was gone, leaving Louie perusing a nondescript room with about twenty round tables, each with eight chairs facing eight neat warm fruit-cups and eight glasses of water. Not a whiskey nor a bottle of wine in sight. “Shit,” he said loudly and then looked around to make sure no one heard him.

Disguised behind his goatee, Louie looked down and attempted to glide unobserved to table 15, which he saw about in the middle of the room. Successful in not recognizing anyone, Louie grabbed a chair and sat down immediately, only then realizing he had his back to the small podium. Too late to get up, and no one else seated yet, he unfurled his napkin, took a small corner of orange from his fruit-cup before he realized he should wait for the others, and occupied himself with the list of attendees he found on the table.

*****

“Will ya hurry up, ya dork. It’s freezin’ here.”

“I know it, I know it. I’m tryin’ as fast as I can.”

“Well, it ain’t fast enough Louie. My damned hand is frozen to the fuckin’ door it’s so cold. How long does it take you to piss, anyway?”

“I’m tryin’. It’s so cold my dick won’t straighten out, fa godzake.”

Joel held the door as wide as he could, looking over his shoulder, fearful that some teacher might come down the hall any minute.
“Jesus,” Joel said.

“It’s coming I tell ya. Yeah. AAHHH.”

The sound of a couple of splishes, then a steady stream of sound as Louie’s urine splatted onto the concrete landing, a hint of steam rising as the fluid hit the frozen surface.

“Aaahh,” moaned Louie. “Aaahh, did I ever have to take a leak!”
Joel closed the door half way. “What, now you’re trying to set the Guinness record, longest piss outta a doorway? Come on, pinch it off, let’s go.”

Mr. Greenberg vaporized over Joel’s shoulder, somehow traversing the worn grey tile floor without so much as a squeak of his rubber-soled shoes. “Well, this is quite a sight. Just what is going on here, gentlemen?”

Joel jumped and lost his grip on the door, which began to close rapidly, hitting Louie in his rump and almost throwing him out onto the landing. Frantically, he tucked his hardware into his shorts and started to pull up the zipper on his jeans. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to stop urinating; a warm trickle escaped his boxers and soaked into his denims. A small dark spot formed, visibly, near his right pocket.

A thin smile spread over Greenberg’s pasty face, cutting into his jowls, squinching up his cheeks until his horn-rims rose a half-inch off his nose. “This better be good,” he said. “What are you gentlemen doing?”

Louie looked down, tongue-tied. A silence that Joel felt obliged to break. “Mr. Greenberg! It was—just a dare.” He could not tell the truth, it was too embarrassing, too revealing. And if word got out, the truth might even prove to be – dangerous.

“A dare? A dare to urinate out a doorway on the coldest day of the Fall? You expect me to believe that?”

Louie found his tongue long enough to blurt out, “Yeah, a dare. It was a bet actually. It was…. Well, you see Steve Hochberg said that—uh….” The lie was too complicated; it died on his lips.
“Well, let’s all walk down to Principal Thorne’s office and we can discuss this – incident a little further. I am sure the Principal will be fascinated.”

“Let me see if I understand this precisely.” Thorne sat back in his swivel chair, his mustache twitching as he spoke, his thin freckled hands making a small tent on top of his vest. You, Mr. Fleisher, were holding open the door on the East side of the school and you, Mr. Gittleson, were micturating out onto the landing in broad daylight? Do I have that correctly?”

“I was pissing, sir. I – uh – am not sure about the mictering thing.”

Thorne rolled his eyes, beady little black marbles deep in his gaunt face. “Micturating, not mictering, Mr. Gittleson. It means urinating. Or as you prefer, ‘pissing.’”

“Oh” said Louie.

“And you, Mr Fleisher were watching all this?”

“Well, sorta. I mean I held the door, I wasn’t exactly, uh, looking at Louie’s – uh, you know?”

“And, Mr. Greenberg, you came upon this cameo moment and made due inquiry and were told this was something of a ‘dare’?”
Greenberg did not like Thorne, who was something of a prig. New to the High School and clearly not relishing an assignment to a large school in the toughest part of Brooklyn, his approach was to condescend which was fine for the students, but Greenberg had been teaching here for twenty years and he did not like being looked down upon by someone who was more martinet than educator.

“Yes, that’s right,” he answered curtly. At that moment, he was almost sorry he had brought the boys to Thorne’s office, regardless of what was happening out the doorway.

“Do you boys have anything to say to me that might explain or excuse this violation of public decency and school decorum,” asked Thorne.
He waited, enjoying the awkward silence.

“Alright, I understand your reluctance to talk with me. You will each be suspended for a week. During that time, perhaps you can get your story straight while you write an apology to me and Mr. Greenberg and try to explain to your mothers the phone call I will make to each of them this afternoon. Mr. Greenberg, you have cafeteria next period I believe. Ask Miss Milliponte to proctor that function. Help these boys gather their clothes and books and escort them out the front door; please come back past my office and kindly confirm that you have done so. Thank you all, you are all dismissed.”
Thorne then made the pretense of starting to read a package of papers he picked up off his desk; he did not look up until he heard the door click shut.

Thorne dropped the papers back onto his desk, and rocked back into his chair, eyes closed, and enjoyed feeling sorry for himself. What quirk of chance had landed him, three years before retiring, as jailer in this hellhole that was supposed to be an educational institution? Whose feathers had he ruffled at the Board of Education to earn this demotion, cleverly described to him as an “opportunity to apply his time-honed skills in a more challenging assignment”? A school full of Negroes who dribbled basketballs in the hallways, a smattering of Italian kids who did not want to be there, and this annoying clump of Jews, kids like this Gittleson and this Fleisher, one of them urinating out a doorway if that doesn’t beat all. And Greenberg; a teacher but one of them, did he think I didn’t notice that little grin on his face as I was dealing with these little perverts?

“Shit,” he said out loud, and then closed his eyes and thought about his last assignment in Riverdale, out there among the single-family houses with grass in the yards.

*****

Each day, the students spent 20 minutes in their home room, with attendance taken and announcements made, before heading out to their various classrooms. Home room made Louie nervous. Home room made all his friends nervous. All his Jewish friends. Of course, he didn’t have any friends who weren’t Jewish, all in college prep classes. But home room was arranged alphabetically, seemingly in an effort to let students who did not share classes mingle with each other. Louie stood reciting the pledge of allegiance with everyone else, being careful not to speak the new words someone had decreed should be added, the “under God.” He had heard his father tell his mother that he objected to those new words, and had heard his mother tell his father to keep his mouth shut even if the “God” referred to didn’t happen to be a reference, they were sure, to their family’s God. After that, Louie just mouthed those two words, afraid to keep his mouth closed lest he be observed, but faithful to whatever his parents seemed to be talking about.

The class room was arranged in six rows of six small desks, two rows adjacent and aisles separating the paired rows. Sitting down from the pledge, Louie glanced quickly to his left at Tommy Holmes, the Negro assigned to the adjacent seat. He was afraid to look too long, fearful he would be perceived as “staring.” In almost three months, they had said not one word to each other.
Tommy took out a fountain pen and began daubing small puddles of dark ink onto his trousers. Head down and intent on his task, Tommy’s eyes were not paying any attention to Louie, and Louie leaned slightly to his left, not understanding what Tommy was trying to do with the ink. All of a sudden, Tommy must have sensed Louie.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at?”

Louie jumped. “Uh, nothing.”

“Say what?” Tommy’s tone was not friendly. Tommy was six foot eight and the star center on the school’s basketball team, the only sports team at the school.

“Uh, I was sorta looking at what you’re doing with the pen, ya know?”

“Yeah, well I’m just fillin’in the white spots where there’s jizzum on the outside.”

“I’m sorry,” said Louie.

“What you sorry for, huh. Ain’t your pants that’s fucked up.”
“No, I’m sorry I, um, disturbed you.”

“Didn’t bug me none, kid. Ain’t you never had this – situation.”
Louie wanted to stop talking, wished the bell would ring so everyone could get up and walk to class. Besides, he didn’t know what to say. He had no idea what the white stains were, though they were in some embarrassing places. He just looked down and did not answer.
Tommy took out a black composition book, opened it and stared at the page. After about a minute, he turned back to Louie.

“Hey, you takin’ math?”

“Sure. We all gotta take math.”

“You know how to do this? I can’t follow this shit. Don’t know what the fuck they talkin’ about.” He slid the notebook to the edge of his desk, and Louie gingerly lifted it in front of him and stared at five problems hand-copied into the book. They were simple multiplication problems, a number with four digits times another number with two digits.

“Yeah, I can do this,” Louie said, not mentioning that he had done multiplication in third grade and now his honors class was working quadratic equations. “Want me to teach – uh, show you how this works?”

“I don’t give a crap but tell ya what, if ya can do them why don’tcha just fill in the answers for me.”

“In your notebook? You want me to write in your notebook?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Ten seconds later the bell rang to change classes. By then Louie had filled in all the answers and handed the book back. Tommy took the book, stood up and walked towards the door. He did not say a word.

A few days later, another home room. Tommy’s head was down, resting on his folded arms, hunched over the desk which was ridiculously small for him. Tommy sat up with a start, scaring Louie, who felt compelled to say something. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just tired. Noisy in my street last night.”

“Say, how did that math homework work out?”

“Yeah, fine but that bitch said ‘real good’ and gave me some more problems to copy. That shit just don’t go away, y’know?” Tommy started to put his head down again, then stopped and turned to Louie, pivoting in his seat so abruptly that Louie recoiled, sliding to the right edge of his chair.”

“I got an idea,” Tommy said. “Wanna hear?”

No, thought Louie, and “yes” said Louie.

“You can do my math for me. That way I can get the grade and stay playing on the basketball team. It don’t seem to be too hard for you; you gonna have to make a mistake or two or she gonna get suspicious, ya know?”

Louie almost felt the sweat form at his hairline, deep near his skull and hidden by his flop of brown locks. It’s wrong, he thought. I don’t think I should say no, he thought. Oh shit, he thought, why hadn’t he pulled a home room seat next to some white kid, even an Italian.

“Sure, glad to,” he said out loud with a enthusiasm which he then regretted.

“It’s a thing,” said Tommy and stuck out his hand which Louie had to shake, fearing a crunching pressure and being shocked by the gentle pump while enclosed in what he was sure was the largest hand he had ever seen up close.

Tommy dropped the hand and a big smile spread across his face.

“Hey, I got another idea. How good you in English? And biology? I got troubles all over the place, ya know.”

“You want me to do all your homework,” Louie exclaimed with an unintended edge in his voice that echoed his real reaction.
“Yeah. It ain’t hard but I need to be sure I can stay eligible. You don’t go to no games, do ya? I’m the center, we ain’t been beat, we goin’ to the championship with Boys High end of the season.”

Tommy knit his brow and then his smile returned. “I can see you ain’t too happy about this. You thinkin’, I doin’ this nigger’s work, what’s in it for me? You thinkin’ if I don’t say yes, he and his guys they gonna pound my ass one day goin’ home. Well, I know what you white guys think about us; we can dribble but we can’t think and we settle everything with a push-button knife, right? Well, you don’t know shit about me or about us, got it? Not shit! But you don’t learn that, right? So here’s the thing. You tell me what you want back as payment. Anyone bothering you here, that you want dissuaded? We can talk to him ya know. You get clean-up assignment in the cafeteria? When you name on that list, you want someone ta take care a that for ya? You tell me, kid, what you want that I can do to pay you up for your – help?”

“You don’t have to do anything. We’re classmates, right. Glad to help.” Louie heard the shrill fear in his voice and hated himself for it. It was true, he was petrified of the colored kids and knew, just knew, that they hated the white kids. But was it smart not to ask for something? Tommy didn’t look like he would enjoy being beholden to him for the homework; Tommy’s self-respect was on the line, his cred.

Then Louie had his epiphany. It struck him like a hard slap in the face, it stung his awareness, it lit his body on fire. It was genius. And it was something that Tommy could do. Yes indeed; a big favor, but for Tommy easy as running the basketball floor; he could do it with confidence, with grace, and it would be truly, deeply appreciated.

“Tommy, do you know how my friends and I take a piss?”

Tommy’s body tensed, but Louie held up a hand. “Let me finish. Here’s what we do. Someone holds open an outside door and we piss outside.”

Tommy’s face started to laugh but he caught himself; the kid was telling him something serious.

“You know why, Tommy? Betcha don’t so I’ll tell ya. Because if you’re white and Jewish you can’t go into any of the boys bathrooms. And here’s why. The big one near the front door, that’s the Italian bathroom. If ya just gotta go and if you happen to know one of the guys who’s there that day, you can get in for a dollar. Who has a dollar most days? The ones down the long halls? The Lords have the one near the library. The Rebels got the one on the other side. You think they let me in? You crazy? No how.”

“Then there’s the locker room, the big bathroom next to the gym. Who has that one, Tommy? You tell me.”

“We got it. The basketball team. But everyone uses that one.”

“Sure, when you’re at gym, the coach is there. Or when there’s a game going on, everyone is there. But say it’s fourth period and you gotta take a leak. And you’re me. Do I go in there? Do I walk in there? Bullshit I do.”

“So say that’s right, just sayin’,” Tommy now struggling to understand what he didn’t understand. Because now that he’s hearing it he knows it’s true. There is no Jewish bathroom, that’s for sure. Those guys couldn’t run a water fountain at the school, let alone secure a whole bathroom. “So you tell me, whaddaya do? Go running to the Principal, ask if you can piss in his bucket?”

“Oh, right, Tommy, Thorne gives a shit where the Jews piss. Guess again? What, no ideas? I tell ya. You get a friend, you go to the back doors and your friend holds open the door so you don’t get locked out and you piss out the door. Yeah, go ahead and smile but it ain’t funny. And you know what ya do when ya gotta crap? Ya pick up your coat and books and go home, and tell your mother that school ended early for teacher conferences or something because ya can’t tell her what’s really happening.”

Louie stared right at Tommy, a bit of his spittle jiggling on the edge of Tommy’s desk, and for the first time Tommy could not hold Louie’s look. His eyes dropped and as he said quietly, almost a whisper, “so you wanna use our bathroom?”

“Yeah. I’ll do all your homework. All your classes, I can, ya know. I can do all your homework in homeroom. And I won’t tell anyone. I’ll try to slip in so no one sees me doing it. At least, no one who’s white. But I can use the basketball team bathroom whenever I want. You tell the guys. Whenever I want. All til I graduate.”

Exhausted, his head dropped but he looked at Tommy over his glasses. “We got a deal,” he asked?

Tommy’s face was placid, no expression. But his eyes showed an empathy which echoed in his voice. “Yeah, kid, we got a thing here. We all got problems. Right? So you and me, we got our thing.”
They sat a minute, looking at each other, and the class bell thankfully rang. They each stood and started down their aisles when Tommy turned.

“Hey, kid. What the fuck’s your name, anyhow.”

*****

Myra stood at the rostrum and said the usual things one says. Who came furthest? Do we remember the school song? None of our teachers were able to attend, mostly they had just disappeared into life. Many no doubt into death. Brian Cooper, most likely to succeed, come up and say a few words about being a dentist in Miami. Prettiest girl, Phyllis come on up and let us see how beautiful you still are after all these years (no mention of the plastic work that seemed to be surprisingly prevalent). Isn’t it great to see old friends after all these years. Who wants to say a few words?

Louie was leaning over, talking earnestly about the Boston Red Sox while Joel was explaining why the New York Mets were in a rebuilding year, when the speeches ended. Their table was made up of three couples and the two of them.

One couple had flown up from Florida; many others seemed tan, fit and living in the South, well-dressed, successful in their own ways as teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, owners of stores or chains of stores. Gloria Shipley had married a Wall Street trader whom she had in tow, he in an incongruous suit and tie. Steve Shanksy was a retired doctor from Patchogue, Long Island, who kept talking about his house in East Hampton (“one block from the water, close enough but you want to avoid the direct ocean spray,” he rationalized). Rachel Plotnik was accompanied by her husband Ricky Spinelli, a classmate who seemingly made a fortune in cinder blocks.

People talked about old times, surrounding their memories with well-placed references to their success in life, their children and grandchildren. Louie was measuring when to leave, to say his farewell to Joel with whom he found he had little in common, and was about to make his move when a lithe black man with small goatee walked up to Louie’s small knot of people. Until then, Louie had not focused on the fact that there were no black faces, no brown faces at the reunion. Indeed, the reunion crowd was an echo of his own experience at the High School; de facto separation of people by race, religion, ethnicity, and indeed by wealth – or in the old days, more like degrees of poverty.

“May I introduce myself,” the man asked while not expecting an answer. “I’m Drew Carter. Class of ’59, but I guess most people are here for that reason also.” He paused. “I don’t think I had many classes with you folks, but then again it was so long ago….”

Joel stood and offered his hand. “Joel Fleisher. Pleased to meet you. Or rather, see you again.”

“Sit down, join us,” said Louie, feeling inwardly trapped by circumstance.

“Don’t mind if I do. Ya know, I used to run up and down the basketball court all day and think nothing of it. Now if I stand too long, my knees get stiff. Come to think, they also get stiff if I sit also.” A wry smile hinted it needed to emerge, then finally broke free.

“So what did you play on the team,” Spinelli asked. “Used to love that team. Went all the way to the City finals what, twice while I was there.”

“Yeah, we did, we did. We were good all right but we never could get over on Boys High. In those days, that school could recruit from all over Brooklyn. We just had the guys in the hood, ya know. We were good alright, but they was great. Great…” as he trailed off, his eyes focused somewhere into the past.

“There aren’t a lot of black people here at the reunion, the school was what, maybe divided in half.” Rachel paused, then plunged ahead. “Do you know why that’s so, Drew? Can I call you Drew?”

“Sure, sure you can. Ya know, actually only two of my people came to attend today, me and Minerva, never did recall her last name, she’s Minerva Stetson now, but she wasn’t feeling all that well, I took her downstairs and put her in a cab just before they served. Ya know, it was sort of, well, very segregated when we went there. Not a lot of friends of mine here, tell the truth. I mostly hung with the team, we was all black ya know. Fact, lookin’ around, only one I recognize is you, Louis. I only recognize you from your pin, a’course. You was real good friends with Tommy, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Louie said.

“Now lots of my people aren’t here for a whole bunch of reasons.” Drew cleared his throat. “Some, they moved away. A lot got in trouble, ya know. A lot went to prison, didn’t come back around here. Truth is, many are dead, some naturally, some not so naturally. And I know a bunch still in Brooklyn, live near me, but their health it isn’t so good these days.” He looked around at the tanned, tone group and almost sighed. “We don’t last as well as you folks seem to have lasted, truth be told.”

Joel broke the awkward moment. “Where are you living, Drew. You look pretty chipper.”

“Oh, I’m okay as these things go. I still live in the neighborhood, Utica Avenue down near where the school used to be before it went to hell and they took it down. I worked my whole life around here. Started as a bus-boy at Cohen’s Deli on Remsen. Went on to be the cook and when Mrs. Cohen retired I bought the place. Learned to cook Jewish, ya know. Ran it til about five years ago. Whole neighborhood changing. Young people moving in. All kinds, though mostly white I guess. A developer bought the building, evicted me and put up a small apartment, but it was okay. It was time….”

“Any kids, Drew?” Rachel leaned forward, gentle with the question.

“No, actually never married. Spent my time working. Restaurants are a hard business. Tried to stay in touch with the guys, mostly the guys on the team, though. I think I may be the only one left.”

Louie had to ask: “What about Tommy? Is he still around?”

Drew looked up, mild reproach on his face. “Didn’t stay in touch, I guess, didja? Well, life is like that. You were pretty tight, though, for a time. No, he got out of school and drove a truck for a while. Then he had an accident one night, driving. Think he might have been high, he was using pretty regular by then. He just got killed that night, was all. In Queens I think on the BQE. Never did like that Expressway.”

“Sorry to hear it,” said Louie.

“Yeah, well that’s how it goes,” Drew replied. “Never did understand the two of you, back in the day. You was so tight, Tommy he told us you could use our bathroom any time, no hassle. That was something, I tell ya!”

Joel caught Louie’s eye, his lips open but with no sound coming out. Louie flashed him a wide smile, and turned to Drew.

“We had a special relationship, Drew. It was our thing,” he said.