“They were nice,” he said.
“But how’d you see them?” I asked again, and I was getting anxious to hear the answer because I wanted an answer before I got in trouble for trying to see them. I wanted to know that he had really seen them.
“I was climbing on the roof because I thought maybe I could see her. I saw from the street that her lights were on and her shade was not pulled down and I wanted to see if I could see, so I climbed up there and I saw them. I really did and they were this big.”
He held his cupped hands together again, but this time what he was not holding was bigger.
We all believed. At nine twenty, in the dark and with the cold autumn air working through our jackets, half a dozen boys climbed onto a garage roof and then made a flying leap across three arm lengths of space to the roof of the factory.
“Wow, that was close,” said Vinnie.
The rest of us had jumped the entire way and landed on our feet. Vinnie was hanging off the edge of the factory roof, holding onto the metal edge. He pulled himself up. Vinnie was strong, but he was not a jumper.
“It’s good you didn’t fall,” said Tommy.
“Shhh,” said Buster.
Tommy whispered. “It’s good you didn’t fall or you would have made a lot of noise.”
“I might have been killed too,” said Vinnie.
“Yeah, but you would have made noise and then none of us could see her,” said Tommy.
We crawled along the roof, bending low like cats on the cold tar and gravel. We knew no one was inside the big factory except the night watchman and he could only take our names if he caught us, and the chances were very slim that he could catch even one of us.
We were giddy as we got across from Vanessa’s back windows.
At nine twenty-five, half a dozen boys lay side by side on the roof with heads propped up on hands, staring at the back of a dark apartment window.
“I bet she’s beautiful with no clothes on,” said Tommy.
“I once saw a naked girl, but she was my cousin,” said Vinnie.
“That doesn’t count,” I said.
We lay there for ten minutes saying nothing before Tommy said, “I’m so cold I can’t feel my thing anymore.”
“You will when she shows up,” said Vinnie.
“Suppose we get caught,” said Johnny. “They could arrest us as Peeping Toms.”
“We’ll just say we lost a ball on the roof,” said Tommy.
“So why are we trying to find it at night?” asked Johnny.
“Because I got it for my birthday,” said Tommy, “and if we don’t find it, I’ll be in trouble.”
Ten more minutes and we were clenching our teeth to keep them from chattering.
“If she doesn’t come soon I’m going to have to go home,” said Vinnie.
We all had that same problem, but Tommy said he didn’t care. He would get in trouble to see Vanessa.
It was ten after ten. We knew the time because we could see the Sealtest Milk Company clock if we looked the other way across the tracks. We could also read “Any Time Is The Right Time For Milk.” None of us ever got a watch, not even a cheap one for Christmas or our birthdays because of that clock. And none of us wanted to look at the clock because it would mean that we had to go and more importantly, we might be looking the wrong way when Vanessa came into her room.
Then suddenly, out of the blackness, the light came on in the window and we went rigid. Buster was right. We could see right into her bedroom. It was going to happen. Vanessa walked in and started combing her hair. We gasped. She began braiding her hair. We crawled closer to the edge of the roof.
“Can you see that?”
“Look at that!”
“Holy cow!”
We were all whispers while Vanessa combed in silence.
Then in answer to all our hopes and wishes and dreams and secret prayers, she started to unbutton her shirt.
“Oh, God.” It was a gasp. It was going to happen.
She took off her shirt and we saw a white bra for almost a full second before her sister walked into the room and went to the window and pulled down the shade.
“She knows we’re here,” said Tommy in less of a whisper and more of a panic.
“No way, she can’t,” said Vinnie.
But we knew we had been spotted. Why else would she have pulled the shade so fast and so firmly? We fell over each other trying to get off the roof before we were caught. We jumped to the garage roof and then down to the ground. Even Vinnie jumped and Vinnie can’t jump.
There must be a god who cleaned away the broken bottles and cinder blocks and garbage cans from our landing pad because we didn’t look before we leaped. We hit the ground and just kept running.
“Did you see her?” shouted Vinnie as he ran. “I mean, did you see her bra?”
“She was almost naked,” Johnny said, while the night air blew past his face and his feet pounded.
When we stopped running we fell over each other laughing and talking and describing how much nakedness we had seen.
“I swear she almost had her bra off. I swear I saw it,” said Jimmy Lee.
“I saw her naked. I mean I saw it, just before the shade went down. Didn’t you see her?” That was Joey who sat on the curb with a smile and faraway look.
We all went home that night with an excitement in our bodies that we had not known before. It was a blissful feeling.
“How’d the basketball game go?” Tommy’s father asked.
“Fine, really fine,” Tommy said.
“Maybe tomorrow night I’ll come down and see what you’ve accomplished,” said his father.
Tommy had the curse of having a father who kept trying to see what Tommy was doing instead of spending his time in the bar like normal fathers. Tommy always said the other kids were lucky.
The Greatest Game Ever Played
The next morning on the way to school Tommy and Vinnie and Johnny and Joey and Buster and I gathered at the end of the block and tried to figure some way of turning the street into a basketball court. We had a ball, which we had stolen from the school – we were mad because we had to learn basketball, which we didn’t understand.
“You do not get your hands dirty, do you understand?”
No, we didn’t understand.
That was the gym teacher, who was also the history teacher in P.S. 54, which is still on 127th Street, just off Jamaica Avenue where the trains still rumble by.
“This is called basketball. It’s what’s played all over America, and this is America so we will play it. And you don’t get your hands dirty. If I see dirty hands you’re out.”
We looked at our hands. They were dirty. We had not begun and we were already finished.
“You use your fingertips, that’s all, and you bounce it, like this.”
He bounced the big ball using his fingertips and we watched and we got bored and started fighting.
“Hey, you kids. Stop that or you’re going to the principal’s office.”
We stopped. He bounced.
“This is purely American. It’s as American as apple pie. Do you kids know what apple pie is?”
To be honest, none of us had ever had a piece of apple pie. I know that’s hard to believe, but most of our mothers said if they were ever asked, “Do you know how long it would take me to make the crust? I haven’t got all day. I’m a busy woman.”
“I didn’t think so,” said the gym teacher when he saw a row of blank stares. “Well, this is American and you will learn it.”
He did not tell us that it was invented by a Canadian, who was trying to figure out a way to keep kids playing something when it was too cold to play outside. The Canadian gym teacher was working in Springfield, Massachusetts, where you can’t do much of anything outdoors in winter.
“Do any of you dummies know what soccer is?” our gym teacher asked.
We all stared blankly.
“Soccer is a game they play in Europe. Do any of you kn
ow where Europe is?”
We all raised our hands and shouted, “That’s where we bombed and killed the Nazis!”
“But where is it?” he asked.
We all stared. We knew where.
“Over there,” we said because that was what we had been told, over and over.
“Well, it’s far away and none of you are ever going to get there. But they play something called soccer there and they kick a ball like this.”
He held up the basketball.
“They kick it with their feet and they can’t use their hands.”
We stared blindly. We were trying to learn about basketball and now he was telling us about something called soccer, which sounded impossible. We were trying to imagine how you don’t use your hands. All sports use hands, even though we only knew one sport, baseball, and your legs were for running, and maybe kicking in a fight, but not for kicking a ball.
“Well, some guy in America invented this to replace soccer in the winter. Don’t worry if you don’t understand. You don’t understand anything anyway.”
He still never mentioned the Canadian.
Then he started bouncing the ball and we stared. “You use your fingertips to control it.”
We steal it to control it, we thought.
There was a new metal hoop with a backboard put up outside the door of the school in the concrete playground. He took us outside and said we would throw the ball at the hoop and if we scored that was a basket.
“I thought it was supposed to be played indoors,” said Tommy.
“Don’t be a wise guy,” said the gym teacher. “That was when they invented it, but we’re playing it now. Besides, we don’t have a gym in the school.”
Education was so confusing.
“When you get the ball through the hoop, you get a basket.”
We had heard that before, but we did not know what it meant. None of us had ever seen a basketball game. It was not on television and even if it was, only Vinnie said he had a television but we never saw it.
There was Warren and Brian who lived down the street from us when we lived with my father in Brooklyn. They had a television.
Every night, the other neighbours and my mother and I would carry folding metal bridge chairs down the street to Warren and Brian’s house. And we would sit in a room that had linoleum on the floor and watch the television. Mostly it had wrestling. But the kids tried to get there early to watch Howdy Doody. That was the greatest show ever on television, with Buffalo Bob. I wanted Buffalo Bob to be my father and Howdy to be my friend.
But we didn’t see basketball.
“Now let’s see some of you hoodlums try to get a basket,” said the gym teacher.
We had no idea what he was talking about.
“Why is it a basket if it’s a hoop?” someone asked.
This is the street where we grew up—132nd Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, New York. It was our corner of heaven where we hung out and where we fed Stumpy the pigeon (his story is on page 106). I see only magic here.
“Because it’s basketball,” he said. “You really are stupid.”
That was the day we stole the ball. After we went back inside to go to spelling lessons, we watched where the teacher put the ball. It was never seen again. The next day the teacher taught us to do push-ups, like they do in the Army.
“You little jerks will pay for that.”
On 132nd Street, we gathered with our basketball.
“We need a backboard. How do we get a backboard?”
Johnny said he could do that. Johnny could do anything with nails and wood. He built forts in the alley. They were made from wood he found around the factories and with nails he found on the street.
He told us to look for wood for the backboard and soon we came back with a couple of pallets that had fallen off delivery trucks.
“We need nails,” Johnny said.
We searched around the factories and came back with handfuls of bent nails.
“We need some tools,” Johnny said.
It was the first time I saw Johnny happy. Mostly he hung around with the rest of us playing stoopball waiting for his father to come home.
“I got a hundred and fifty,” said Johnny, catching a pointer off the edge of the stoop.
“You can’t have that much,” said Vinnie, who was not a good catcher. “You’re cheating.”
“I don’t cheat,” said Johnny, who was a very good catcher.
He threw the ball against the stoop. It bounced coming back to him.
“Five.”
He threw again, and he caught it on the fly.
“Ten,” he said. “That’s one sixty-five.”
“Cheater,” said Vinnie, who was reading a comic while waiting for his turn.
Johnny threw again and the ball hit the pointed edge of a concrete step. It flew back like a homer smashed by a stick on the street. This came so fast Johnny jumped. He had good reflexes. He stuck his arm up and grabbed the ball before it went into the street.
“Twenty-five,” he shouted. “That’s one ninety,” he said after a pause to add it up.
We all learned to count from stoopball, just like we learned odds from the cleaner who was a bookie.
“That’ll be eight to five on the number five horse in the fifth,” we heard the customers say.
“My mother wants this cleaned and pressed, and don’t miss the spots, she said to tell you,” I said.
“Five to one on number six in the seventh,” said the old man in line after me.
“What’s five to one?” I asked the man behind the counter after the man behind me had passed over a dollar without getting any clothes in return and I waited to ask because I wanted to learn the mysteries of dry cleaning.
The man behind the counter held his ball of thread and needles and said, “He gets five dollars if his horse comes in, but it won’t because it’s a nag. And I didn’t say that, all I do is mend clothing, you got that, kid?”
I nodded and left. Five to one means just that. And if you add those calculations to the five, ten and twenty-five points of stoopball you got all the math you need to know. Let them give me a test. Five to one you are not going to get a pointer worth twenty-five. Math was just the world of stoopball and a visit to the cleaners.
And then what usually happened was Johnny saying, “My father’s coming.”
We knew what that meant. We left. I watched Johnny watching his father stagger down the street from the bar. I wanted to tell him that I knew what it was like to watch your father stagger like a drunk because he was what your mother called a stupid drunk, but I did not get the chance because Johnny wanted us to leave him alone.
He grabbed his father’s arm and steered him into the house.
I remember the first time I saw Johnny when I was new on the street. He was reading comic books but I did not know why.
“Johnny had a dog,” Dorothy told me.
“He found it wandering the street and he put a rope around its neck and Johnny was so happy. They ran down the street and then back up the street.
“Johnny’s mother would not let him keep it inside and Johnny’s father hated dogs. So Johnny built a house for it by the railroad tracks and he bought milk for it and gave it cookies and every day Johnny would spend all day with it.
“And then Johnny was running one day and the rope slipped out of his hand and the dog kept running and went out into the street and a car was going by and the dog ran right in front of the car and was killed.”
That was when Dorothy stopped talking. She was crying.
“The dog just was splattered in the street and Johnny hugged it but it wouldn’t come back to life and Johnny went home. The dog was there the next day and the day after and the day after and it rained and water went around it and the cigarette butts got caught in its fur and it just stayed there.”
Dorothy was talking but she was not looking at me. She was looking straight ahead like she was looking at something, but not at me.
Dorothy looked at me. I thought she was beautiful.
“Johnny just read comics after that for a long time.”
That was when I met him, a couple of days after I moved in. He was in the back alley sitting on the ground with his back against a wall reading comics.
“Can I read some of your comics?” I asked.
He looked up.
“I’m new here. I live a couple of doors away,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He just looked, then nodded and pointed to a stack of comics on the ground next to him.
I sat down and looked through them. Lots of Archie and some Donald Duck and Superman and some with war stories. I took one of the Archie and Jughead, even though I couldn’t read so well, but I looked at the pictures.
“My name’s Mickey,” I said.
He nodded and kept reading. I kept reading. A few minutes later he said his name was Johnny.
“I used to have a dog,” he said.
“What happened to it?”
“He got killed. Here, you can read my Superman. I just finished it.”
But today with the basketball backboard it was different. Johnny was happy.
“We need some tools,” he said.
Buster and Vinnie both came back with crowbars. They both got them from underneath their older brother’s beds.
“What do they use crowbars for?” I asked.
“Work,” they both said.
“My brother works at night and says he needs the crowbar for moving things.”
“Mine too,” said Vinnie.
Johnny used the crowbars like a hammer to straighten the nails on the ground. Then he tore the pallets apart and put the pieces back together to make a solid board. I had never seen anyone work with tools before.
I remember once my mother showing me an electric socket that was sticking half out of the wall with wires hanging down.
“That’s the kind of work your father does,” she said.
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