I ripped it open. There was a flattened piece of aluminum foil and a packet of dirt and another smaller packet of seeds.
“Fold the edges of the foil up into a receptacle, then fill it with the soil and place the seeds on top. Water and wait for your mini-backyard garden.” The instructions I could read, but did not believe.
It was the size of my forearm. It was not a backyard. I measured it. It was 12 x 15 inches. I thought two marks after the 12 in the ad meant feet, since feet were bigger than inches and I thought one mark meant inches, since inches were smaller than feet.
We could not eat hot dogs on this. I could not invite Junior to play on grass that was the size of one of his hands with the fingers stretched out.
I went outside and made a snowball. No, I made a grey ball. The soot had stopped falling but the snow was still turning. I threw it at the telephone pole and hit it smack in the middle. I was not the first to nail that target; it was covered with stuck lumps of greying snow. I threw another, then another.
“Are you okay?”
Dorothy’s voice.
“Yeah, sure.”
“I saw you out here alone and wondered how you were.”
“You did?”
She smiled.
Who cares about a garden? Something was growing in me.
The Forest
“It’s coming. The leaves are coming out.”
It was a couple of months later and the life in the tree was returning. It was impossible, but it was true and it was happening right there in front of us, sort of. This truly was a miracle of nature.
My little garden of grass had not grown and my mother threw it out one day when I was not home.
“It was just a tray full of dirt and it was going to draw bugs,” she said.
What’s the point in arguing? It was just a tray full of dirt sitting on the radiator in my room. It got hot when the days were cold, but I was thinking that would keep the seeds warm, like an egg with a chicken.
“No kiddin’, it’s blooming.”
To say we lived in a neighbourhood of no grass or trees is not true. The grass part was true, but not the trees. At least not one tree. We had a tree.
We noticed it the first time only the year before and it was amazing. You did not have to tell us this is not the way life is supposed to be. If you stood near the corner, next to the bar, and looked down through the metal grating that covered a hole in the sidewalk there was the top of the tree reaching up.
The hole was supposed to let light into a window in the basement, but it was so filled with litter and cigarette butts and empty paper coffee cups and newspapers that the window was half covered. But somehow the seed of that tree had come to life down there and it had grown a stubby trunk and had branches that were reaching up toward the grating. Last summer it had leaves that we could see and almost touch.
“That’s a miracle,” said Joey. We knew that a tree had grown in Brooklyn once upon a time because some of our parents had talked about a book that was written about it. But this was a tree in Queens on 132nd Street and that was better.
On sunny days we watched to see if the sun would get to it, but the sun never did. The only light it got was a reflection off the window of the bar and that was only for an hour or so around lunchtime.
“It’s a sumac,” said a guy who came out of the bar. “They’re weed trees. They grow anywhere.” Then he poured half a glass of beer down through the grating.
“That should kill it.”
“What’d you do that for,” said Joey. “That’s not nice.”
The guy went back into the bar and Joey and Vinnie and Jimmy Lee and Vanessa and I said we would not let it die.
“We got to get rid of the beer,” said Vanessa. “Let’s pour water down there.”
She lived the closest to the bar and we all ran back to her apartment. She let us inside. We had never been in there before. It was dark and quiet. There was a crucifix over the kitchen door. Her mother was sitting alone at the kitchen table staring at a wall.
“Mother. These are my friends. We are just getting some water to help a tree.”
Her mother said nothing. Vanessa got out a brown plastic bucket from under the sink and put it under the tap and half filled it. It was too heavy for her to lift so Joey helped her.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said to her mother, who still said nothing.
I felt very creepy. It was like her mother was dead, but she was still breathing.
We all went out and Vanessa closed the door quietly behind her.
“What’s wrong with your mother?” asked Joey.
“After my father died, she just sits. She doesn’t say much. My sister and I cook and watch her, but there’s nothing we can do. A doctor said she’s depressed, but we knew that.”
I felt bad about trying to see Vanessa naked. You are not supposed to see someone naked when they are taking care of their mother. But then I looked at her again with her long, dark hair and her bumps that were bigger now than last fall when we were up on the roof and I wondered if I climbed up there again if I might see her. That would be wrong, but I still wanted to.
We carried the bucket to the corner and poured it down over the tree.
“That should wash away the beer,” said Vanessa.
By May the leaves were almost up to the iron bars. Sometimes people would walk over the grating and we would have to tell them to be careful.
“Don’t kill the tree,” we shouted.
But they mostly looked at us like we were crazy. We noticed that most people did not even notice it. That was almost as amazing as the tree being there. How could they not see it? It was true that if the light wasn’t on it you could pass overhead and not see it, but still, it was a tree growing in prison and you should see things like that.
When we told some people to look down, a few said, “Yeah, so what?”
It was hard when you give someone something that was the most incredible thing in the world and they didn’t care.
By June some of the leaves were sticking up past the bars. That was not good. People were stepping on them.
We got some plastic milk crates from the grocery store across Jamaica Avenue and put them on each side of the grating. That worked for about an hour until the man who ran the store came across the street and took them back.
Then we got some garbage cans and put them on the sides of the grating, but the bartender came out almost immediately.
“Are you kids dumb or something?” he shouted. “Get those cans away from my window.”
We carried the cans back to the sides of the houses where we had taken them from. The owners would probably miss them anyway.
“Why don’t we just play here?” asked Buster. He was hanging out with us again. You had friends for a reason or a season someone had said. Buster was last season and he had come back this season. No one asked why. He didn’t move away. Nothing had happened that we knew of, he just moved back into the gang like he had never left.
“We could toss baseball cards here, or pennies,” he said.
That is brilliance. That’s not the kind of thing you learn in school. That’s how to fix a problem with just a little tweaking instead of replacing. But we didn’t know that. We just took out some pennies and began tossing them.
“Buster wins.”
His penny was closest to the wall. The wall was next to the window of the bar. He picked up all four pennies and we started again back at the line.
“Hey, Vinnie, don’t lean over the line,” said Tommy.
“I can lean if I don’t step over it.”
“Can not.”
“Can so,” said Vinnie.
“What do you think, Vanessa? Can he lean over the line?” asked Joey.
The line was the edge of the sidewalk. It was about five feet to the wall. The game is simple; anyone, any number can play at any time. Everyone throws a penny and the closest to the wall wins.
“He can’t lean over the line. He’s go
t to hold his hand behind it,” said Tommy.
“I just have to keep my feet behind it,” said Vinnie.
Vanessa looked at the two of them and I swear she smiled like she wanted to laugh at them but wouldn’t do that because it would make them feel bad. I was glad they didn’t ask me what they should do because no way could anyone say the right thing.
“Why don’t you flip a coin? Heads, Vinnie wins, tails, Tommy.” Vanessa was smart.
Even Vinnie and Tommy looked surprised.
“Okay,” said Vinnie.
“Yeah, okay,” said Tommy.
Vinnie flipped, caught it, turned it over on the back of his wrist and held his hand over it.
“Call it,” he said.
“Heads,” said Tommy.
Vinnie took away his hand.
“You win.”
They went back to flipping with their hands behind the line. It was like they always played this way.
The next few tosses Buster lost.
“I can’t play anymore,” he said.
“Why not?” asked Vinnie, who was winning almost every toss.
“I don’t have any more money.”
“Wanna flip cards?” asked Vinnie.
Buster brightened up. “Yeah, sure. I’ll be right back.”
Baseball cards were poker chips, money, tools of street gambling. Only if you had a Joe DiMaggio or Pee Wee Reese or Jackie Robinson did you save it. And you only saved it until you ran out of your other cards and needed to flip that to win back some of your cards that you lost. And sometimes if Jackie Robinson wasn’t bent or creased too badly you would save it so that someday you could say you had a Jackie Robinson card instead of saying you had one but you lost it, because everyone could say that.
“You want to flip against the wall or matches?” asked Joey, who was very good with matches.
Buster came back with his cards. “I want matches, too.” Tommy and Vinnie and I went home and came back with handfuls of battered, bent and folded cards.
You got a card with a flat piece of bubble gum for a penny, but the bubble gum mostly cracked and didn’t make good bubbles even when you got it chewed. Double Bubble was good for bubbles even though you didn’t get a card with that and it still cost a penny. There was a cartoon wrapped around the Double Bubble but mostly the jokes were so dumb and the writing so small that we hardly looked at it.
Double Bubble was the big wad of gum that you put between your teeth and squeezed. It gave way slowly and felt good with the sweetness running out on your tongue and your jaw muscles tightening. You could feel the strain at the back of your teeth.
“What do you do, chew bubble gum all day?” the dentist would ask. “You have nine cavities. Your mouth is already full of silver.”
I sat up straight and he bent over and drilled. I watched the thick string turning the pulleys that turned the drill. He operated it with his foot pushing a pedal and I could smell the burning of my tooth and I knew the pain was going to hit any second.
“Owwww,” I tried to yell but his hands were in my mouth along with his drill.
“It won’t be much longer, at least not on this hole,” he said. “Eight more to go.”
Three quarters of an hour later – I knew because I was watching his big clock – he was done. My teeth were killing me. He rolled some filling stuff, mostly mercury and silver, in the palm of his hand, then squeezed it into a little instrument that looked like a Tiny Tim tin can on the end of a metal rod and then forced it into the last hole in my last tooth.
“Try to brush them occasionally,” he said as I was leaving. I did not feel well.
On the way home I stopped at Matty’s and got some Double Bubble. I needed something to bite into. I bit and screamed. The sugar squeezed into the new fillings.
“I wish my teeth wouldn’t hurt,” I thought. I chewed some more to get rid of the sugar and walked home blowing bubbles.
Outside the bar, Buster said, “I’ll go first.”
He held a card at the tips of his fingers and flipped it. It somersaulted to the ground and landed flat with the face side up.
Tommy took one of his cards, stood over Buster’s and flipped it. It missed Buster’s card and landed tail side up.
“Ha,” said Vinnie, which was like saying that was the worst throw he had ever seen.
Vinnie flipped his and it landed face side up, but missed touching Buster’s.
Joey flipped and it hammered onto Buster’s landing flat on top, but tails up.
You had to get your card the same side up as the first card and touching it. You have to have some rules.
I flipped and also got it tails up, but I hit Buster’s card, which then disappeared under mine and Joey’s, which now meant that the next person would have to match my card. More rules . . . .
“Can I try?” asked Vanessa.
Buster, Joey and I all handed her cards. She took Buster’s.
“Hey, please be careful of the tree down there,” said Joey to a couple of men who were walking home from one of the factories. They both carried lunch boxes.
“You’re blocking our way,” they said.
“We’re just playing,” said Vinnie. “And we don’t want our tree stepped on.”
“You can’t block the sidewalk, that’s public property,” said one of the men.
Vinnie took a deep breath. He always did that before something bad was going to happen.
“We just don’t want you to hurt this tree,” he said.
The same man who spoke was angry. “Don’t tell me where to walk, kid.”
“I’m not telling you, we just want you not to hurt the tree.”
“You mean that stupid little thing?” he said, pointing at the bars on the sidewalk and the few leaves sticking up past them.
“Please, mister,” said Vanessa. “This tree is going to get hurt if you step on it.”
Then she moved over to the grating and stood in front of it.
“I can’t hit a girl, you know. But if you kids block this way tomorrow, I’m going to call the cops,” said the first man.
“Come on, let’s go,” said the other man. “It’s not worth it.”
They left and we looked at Vanessa with wonder. She had done what we didn’t do.
“That was really brave,” said Joey.
Vanessa almost blushed. “I can’t let it get hurt,” she said.
We left the cards on the ground and stood around our new hero.
“They’ll be back tomorrow and stomp it,” said Buster.
“Whose turn is it?” asked Vinnie.
“Vanessa’s,” said Buster.
Vanessa moved away from the grating, stood over the pile of cards and flipped one of hers. It landed face side up right over top of my card.
“Hey, Vanessa wins,” said Joey.
She picked up all the cards and then gave back the ones she had borrowed.
“You don’t have to,” said Buster.
Vanessa looked like she was far away. Then she said she had an idea.
“They won’t push us aside if we are playing handball here,” she said.
More brilliance. We all knew that handball games had invisible no trespassing signs around them. People could walk right through your penny or card game. But in handball you were moving and jumping and swatting and ducking so no one could walk through a game. Hands were flying. The ball was flying. If anyone tried to stop that, they would be nailed and besides, you don’t break up a handball game. You just don’t. That was a New York rule. Handball was the city’s game, even more than stickball because everyone played it.
Every park in the city had concrete walls for playing and every wall in the city outside the parks had handball games going on so long as the weather wasn’t freezing or raining. Adults played. Kids played. It was played in schoolyards. It was played against walls next to bars. It was played because there are a lot of walls in New York.
The next day we were playing, two games going on at once. One two-man ga
me with Vinnie and Jimmy Lee, and a four-man game a few feet away, with Vanessa and Dorothy playing Buster and me.
We saw the two guys from the factory coming up the street. We kept playing. They got closer. We kept playing, hitting the ball against the wall, then whack, someone else slammed it back. It was fast. It was furious. It was racquetball without the racquets, but we didn’t know that.
“You’re blocking the sidewalk,” said the mean man.
We kept playing. He started moving toward us.
Jimmy Lee hit the ball and drove it right next to the man into the wall and it shot back to Vinnie.
“You trying to hit me?”
“You can’t break up the game,” said Jimmy Lee.
Vinnie hit the ball even harder. Wap. It bounced off the wall. The mean man whipped his head to watch it then turned around and walked out into the street to get past us. He said nothing else.
We won. We knew it. We kept playing but none of us could stop smiling. We hit the ball and grinned and hit the ball again and tried to watch them climb the stairs to the El, but you really can’t take your eyes off the ball for even a blink or you’ll miss it. But we all knew it didn’t matter who won the game, we all won.
We would be back the next day, just in case. There was not much else in life better than winning at handball, and we could do it every day before a good game of stickball.
The next day we were walking up to the corner to play when we saw a truck backed onto the sidewalk and a couple of men standing around the grating.
We ran. The grating was open and the tree was being pulled out by the men who had a rope around it.
“What are you doing? Why are you doing this? This is our tree.”
One of the men laughed.
“You kids crazy? This is just a big weed.”
“No, it’s a tree. Look, it has branches and leaves,” said Vanessa.
The man broke off one of the branches. “Okay, it’s a weed that looks like a tree. Anyway, doesn’t matter, the roots might go through the wall and cause flooding in their basement.”
“It wouldn’t hurt anyone,” said Vanessa.
The man shook his head. “Little lady, we’re getting paid to take this tree, or whatever it is, out. That’s our job, so don’t make it hard.”
Cardboard Ocean Page 19