Beyond that I did not know how things got put together. But Johnny was putting everything together and the board was finished and he said we have to get it up on that pole.
Johnny was a good climber, so we bent over and he got up on our backs until he could reach the spikes that were hand-holds in the pole. He had a crowbar hooked over his belt and a pocket full of nails and he climbed halfway up, just below the wires and just under the street light.
“We need a rope,” said Johnny.
Two little kids ran home and came back dragging a ratty piece of rope behind them. Tommy tied some of the thin parts of it together then threw it up to Johnny. Johnny lowered one end and we tied it to the backboard.
Then Johnny hung the rope over a spike and lowered the other end back down to us. A bunch of us pulled down on the rope while the backboard went up on the other end. I had never been part of anything that was being done by anyone before. Being together was fun.
Johnny hammered the nails through the backboard while we held the rope that held the board. Then Johnny put in more nails. It looked like the whole centre of the board, up and down the pole, was a solid line of nail heads.
He climbed down. Something was missing.
“We need a hoop,” said Dorothy.
Darn. You forget the most obvious stuff. The hoop that was a basket even though it didn’t look like a basket but was the reason the game was called basketball, even though there was no basket.
The only wire we could think of was coat hangers. We got a few, twisted them together and wrapped them around the ball. We knew the ball had to fit through it, and it could.
Johnny climbed down and got the hoop then climbed back up the pole to nail the hoop into the backboard. I did not think I could even climb the pole and there was Johnny climbing and making something. I watched Dorothy watching him and wished I could do things like that.
We chose sides. I wound up on Dorothy’s team. I did not care who else was on our side. Joey was on the other team. I would get the ball, bounce it with my fingertips, throw it up and get a basket and Dorothy would love me.
We started the game. Some of the parents and old folks on the street came out to watch. This was different than stickball. This was new. This was as American as apple pie even though many of the old folks could only speak Italian or Slavic and had no idea what apple pie was.
Most of them had never seen a basketball game. It was getting dark and the street light came on right above the backboard. We bounced and threw the ball to each other and then I got it and threw it up at the hoop. It hit the outside of the hoop and bent the wire.
Then Buster got the ball and threw it and also hit the wire, which was now half flattened against the backboard.
Three more shots at the basket and there was no hoop left.
“I got closest,” said Jimmy Lee. “Our side won.”
We stopped playing. There was nothing left to throw at and we wandered off in small groups. Most went home, a few of us sat on the curb and talked about the Dodgers, who were doing very well this season.
Forty years later I went back to New York for a visit. I told my wife I wanted to go to my old neighbourhood. She said I could go alone because it was an awful place.
I drove my rented car down past the ice cream factory. They were not making ice cream any longer. It was now a street filled with flatbed trucks being loaded up with coils of steel wire. The white ice cream trucks with bungalows on the back were gone. The cardboard ocean was gone. On the corner where the boxes had been were two abandoned and stripped cars.
I parked and walked down 132nd Street. The kids on the block were mostly East Indian and Spanish, but they were like the gangs of 1955. They were hanging out together and watching me. They knew I was an outsider.
The street where the ice cream trucks used to park and get loaded up looks different today. The Cardboard Ocean was against the building on the left. The rooftop was our beach.
I walked past Vinnie’s house and past Vanessa’s and Buster’s and then I stopped and looked up.
“Oh, my God.”
The kids stood safely across the street watching me. The delivery trucks kept passing and the trains passed behind them. An airplane was coming in overhead to land at jfk. The elevated train had been cut down. It only went as far as 130th Street where Rocky had lived. There it turned and went a different route.
I was looking up. On a wooden telephone pole about ten feet up was a shard of wood about a foot and a half long. It had a row of nail heads running up and down the centre.
The new kids on the block watched me staring up at a telephone pole and not moving. I was looking at Dorothy and Buster and Tommy and Joey bouncing a stolen ball and throwing it at a hoop of coat hangers. And I was looking at me looking at Dorothy.
The kids on the street were whispering and pointing at me. They had heard about crazy people, and now they had one right in front of them. They stayed back while I was looking at the remains of Johnny’s hammering.
The kids kept looking while I stood there watching the greatest basketball game ever played. Then I turned around and walked away.
Battle Wounds
In the morning, I had peanut butter and toast for breakfast. For lunch I had peanut butter and jelly in school. When my mother came home at night, we would have our hot dogs and potato salad and a tomato. But one evening before she got home, I had a little accident. I heard her high heels on the front stoop.
“And why is your arm swollen?”
“I was playing king of the mountain around the corner and tripped on a weed.”
“There aren’t any weeds there.”
“It was, and I tripped on it.”
It was a hill almost half the height of the Bungalow Bar trucks that was covered with asphalt and it was right at the end of the street where the trucks parked. We figured it must have been a lot of leftover asphalt that the city workers had dumped a long time ago. And there was a little patch of weeds growing out of a crack at the top.
“I’m king of the hill,” I yelled when I got to the top.
“Are not,” said Joey as he ploughed into me from behind. Hitting from behind was not illegal since there was only one way up the hill after someone else got to the top, and that was from behind.
I lost my balance and fell backwards and put my hands out and hit the hill halfway down and oww, that hurt.
“I got you,” said Joey.
“Oww, my arm hurts,” I said. “But you didn’t get me. I tripped over that weed.”
“Did not. I got you.”
If I tripped over the weed, he wasn’t king of the hill. It was a do over. But my arm was screaming like crazy and I didn’t want to go up and do it again.
“Let’s go read comics,” I said.
We spent the afternoon sitting on Joey’s front stoop reading Donald Duck and Spiderman and Plastic Man. I never understood how Plastic Man could stretch his arm around an entire city block. Flying and having a spiderweb come out of your wrist was okay to believe, but plastic was hard and it didn’t stretch and Plastic Man was making it stretch. Some things you just couldn’t believe.
I held my arm the whole time we were reading because it hurt so badly.
“I don’t know how you tripped over a weed,” said my mother, “but take some aspirin and get four hot dogs and a half pound of potato salad and a tomato for dinner. And make sure the tomato is good.”
I walked up 132nd Street, past Dorothy’s house and past Jimmy Lee’s house and past Joey’s house in the dark. It was always dark when my mother got home.
The houses were all stuck together. They were not really houses, not like you see in Dick and Jane books, they were rows of doors and a roof that went on from one street to the next. But I knew Dorothy was behind that door, and Joey was behind that one.
The train was passing overhead, over the deli.
“Four hotdogs, please,” I said to the man behind the counter. He always smiled.
“Hav yov had
a schlect day?” he asked.
I knew that was German, or Yiddish. They were the same.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. I said that every night after he asked me if I had a bad day.
“Yove want a tomato, too?” he said. He said that every night.
“Yes, and my mother said . . . ”
“Don’t worrvie, Mickey,” he said. “I vill give you a gout tomato and remember, dings vill get better.”
“And a half pound of potato salad,” I said.
He spooned it into a container. His sleeve was rolled up, as it always was, and I could see the numbers tattooed on his forearm.
His wife, who always smiled and was as friendly as he was – no, she was more friendly because she would tell me she was glad to see me – she had numbers on her arm too.
I never asked about the numbers, because I knew what they were and when you are eleven you cannot ask a friendly adult what it was like to be in a death camp and starved while you are waiting for your hot dogs.
“Do yov vant a pickle?” the man would always ask.
His name was Herman, but I never called him that. When you are a kid, even eleven years old, you cannot call someone with numbers tattooed on their arm by their first name.
I could call Matty by his name. He ran the candy store across the street, just under the stairs of the El. His right arm was frozen stiff and bent at the elbow and stuck out like a spear in front of him with his fingers sticking straight out from his hand. It happened when he got a jolt of electricity while working as a lineman and he couldn’t do that work anymore so he ran a candy store.
When he rang up something on the cash register he would put the tips of his right hand on the keys and lean forward. I always wondered what they would do when he died and put him in a coffin. His hand would stick up and they wouldn’t be able to close it.
I could call him Matty. But I couldn’t call Herman by his name. You couldn’t do that to someone who had numbers on his arm.
“A pickle?” he asked again.
I nodded and he pulled a dill pickle out of a jar on the counter and wrapped it in a piece of waxed paper and gave it to me.
“Yov are a gentleman and a scholar,” he would say. He said that every night, and I would walk out of his store while the train went overhead as I ate the pickle while walking home with dinner.
“This tomato is soft,” my mother would say.
But we ate it with the hot dogs and potato salad and I was glad we did not live in Russia because they had meat only once a year.
And then I stopped thinking about that because I was thinking that Joey was two years older than me and Dorothy would never marry a guy a year younger than she was.
Someone was ringing the bell.
Our shopping mall was made up of street shops. The store behind the dumpster on the left was the deli where I got pickles from a man with a number tattooed on his arm.
“Why don’t you tell your friends not to ring the bell at dinner time?” my mother said. She always said that because they always did that.
I did not want to say it’s because we eat later than everyone else so I just shrugged and said I would tell them.
Tommy and Joey and Dorothy were at the door.
“You want to go on night patrol? We’re going to the cemetery.”
“I gotta finish eating,” I said.
“Why you eating so late?” Tommy said.
“Because my mother doesn’t get home until late.”
“You’re lucky,” said Tommy. “You don’t got a father. You don’t get beaten.”
I ran back inside and sat down. My arm was not hurting as much anymore because of the aspirin.
“I’m going out with the guys.”
“Where are you going?”
Her look of iron rules went through me. I wanted to tell Tommy that a mother was worse than a father, but he would not believe me.
“Nowhere, just up to the corner.”
“Be back by nine or you won’t go out again this week. And how is your arm?”
“Good, fine,” I said, even though it still hurt like crazy.
I finished my hot dogs and put my plate in the sink.
“I’ll do the dishes when I get back.”
I ran down the hallway and outside and the air was cool and the night dark and this was heaven. The other kids were standing under the street light. They all had sticks.
“We’re going after the enemy,” said Buster.
He liked war games. We often played shoot ’em up on the street, crawling under parked cars and saying, “Got you. Got your dirty German machine gun nest.”
“Don’t say that,” said Buster. “My father is German. He would have blasted you to kingdom come.”
“Got you, you dirty Jap,” I said.
We didn’t have any Japanese kids around.
The fighting went on from after dinner until we had to go home, and we always won. John Wayne had taught us how to be casual and to kill without blinking.
But tonight we were going where no solider had gone before. We were going to the cemetery.
Did you ever see a hearse go by
and think that you were next to die?
They wrap you up in a clean white sheet
And bury you about six feet.
This was our favourite poem.
All goes well for about a week.
Then the coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in,
The worms crawl out,
They eat your guts
And spit them out.
The wind blows in,
The wind blows out,
In your stomach
And out your mouth.
“Line up,” said Joey.
His father had been in the Army.
“Two by two, and hold your guns on your shoulders.”
We did as he told us. We were in boot camp under the El and would be going into battle on our first night.
“Forward, march.”
We stepped ahead and bumped into each other but kept going.
“You guys, do it right. We have a war to win,” said Joey.
We marched around Barney’s Pharmacy and up the dark street and then turned right on Hillside Avenue and were told by Joey to keep quiet.
“The enemy is out there.”
We got to the cemetery. We had never been so far from home for a battle.
“Over the fence,” said Joey.
“We can’t go over the fence,” said Buster. “That’s private property, and it’s a cemetery and it’s a sin if you go in there.”
Joey leaned down over Buster’s face.
“It is hard to be a soldier, but the enemy is in there.”
Joey was the first to climb the fence. It was chain-link, the same as around the cardboard ocean and we had no trouble going over it. That is, except for me. My arm was hurting so badly I had to climb the fence using just my right hand. I thought this is the way soldiers did it. When they were wounded they just went on.
We fell on the other side and hid behind the gravestones.
“Bang, gotcha,” I said.
“Don’t fire yet,” said Joey. “They are further in.”
We crawled from headstone to headstone, keeping our rifles up in case we were attacked. I dropped down on one side of a headstone and squeezed against it. The enemy might be right on the other side of it.
I moved my rifle around the corner of the stone. “Bang. Gotcha.”
“Shhhh,” said Joey. “They are further in.”
My arm was hurting more but I tried to ignore it. Real soldiers didn’t complain about little things.
We slipped from stone to stone, all of us on a mission to kill the enemy and save the world.
But really, I was scared. The moon was out and we could see the headstones and the monuments in the Jewish part of the cemetery, and then the giant crosses in the Catholic part. I figured the Protestants were the ones with the little headstones.
“I
f we get caught in here we’ll go to jail,” said Dorothy.
It was wonderful that she was with us, but it was strange. Girls were not soldiers. But Dorothy was in the lead and was heading the charge against the enemy.
I was looking at Joey. He was just in front of me, looking over a headstone. His mouth opened, but no words came out. He looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. He was trembling. He was shaking. He dropped his gun.
I had only known Joey for a little while, but I had never seen him scared.
He grabbed the headstone in front of him and pointed.
“Look,” he said.
I looked ahead. Oh my gosh. Oh my lord. Oh, please help me, Jesus. There in front of us were one, then two white ghosts moving between the headstones. They floated on air. They moved toward us, then away. They were not touching the ground. They were not walking. They were not real, but we could see them.
“I’m getting out of here,” said Joey.
He started to run back to where we came from. He tore over the graves and I followed and Dorothy was behind but then ahead of us. Everyone was running. We dropped our rifles and ran and then bang! Vinnie ran into a headstone and got knocked backwards.
“Owwww!”
We stopped. Vinnie was behind us. But I could still see the ghosts moving toward us, and toward Vinnie. We did what we had to do. We ran back and grabbed Vinnie and started to drag him, knowing that if there were barbed wire we would throw ourselves on it for the rest of the Marines to run over our backs, or if there were a grenade, we would throw ourselves on it to save the others.
We picked up Vinnie and ran. He quickly started moving on his own and we were all running toward the fence. Everyone hit it on the fly and started over it. I tried to grab it with my hands, but my left arm was useless. It would not work, and it hurt, with shooting pains that went to my head.
I used just my right hand and when I looked up, Dorothy was at the top of the fence holding her hand down for me to grab. I reached up as I was falling back and she held me and pulled me up. I do not know how she knew I was in trouble.
We got over the fence and ran back to our street without stopping.
Cardboard Ocean Page 7