“Poor Mrs. Belimeyer,” said Vanessa.
“We better get out of here,” said Tommy.
“No, we can’t,” said Dorothy. “We messed up her sheet and we have to fix it.”
The boys looked at her like she was saying something impossible because this was impossible. Sure, she could come up with hooks for fishing, but this was a muddy sheet.
“She’s right,” said Vanessa. “We have to fix it.”
Fix it? Vinnie tried to wipe it off but it smeared further. Fix it?
“How?” I asked.
Vanessa said we needed a pail and some water and soap. Johnny said he could get a pail. There was a hose behind the house that someone used for washing their car. Soap was a problem. No kid could try to sneak out of the house with soap. Suppose he was caught?
“Where do you think you’re going with that soap?”
“Uhhhhhh. Washing something?”
Right there would be an unexplainable problem since no kid at home wanted to wash anything, not the dishes, not himself. It was not like being caught sneaking out with a rat trap or a jar of peanut butter.
“Nothing, just hunting rats,” or “just sharing lunch.”
But soap? Never.
“I’ll try to get some,” said Dorothy.
She was an angel, and she could probably get away with it.
“I’m going out to do some girl stuff with the other girls,” she might say to her mother, or something brilliant like that.
In five minutes, Johnny came back with a pail filled with sand and cigarette butts and Dorothy came back with her blue jeans’ pockets filled with powered detergent. The sand was dumped out and the pail rinsed out. Then the soap went in and a corner of the sheet went on top of the soap and then we poured the water on top.
“I’ll do it,” said Vanessa. She looked so pretty scrubbing I thought for a minute that she was even better than Dorothy, but then I saw Dorothy holding the rest of the sheet so it would not touch the ground and I liked her better again.
When I was older I learned that love is fickle, but I was not fickle then, I was just admiring them both for saving us all and they both looked very nice, especially when they moved.
“I’ll do it now,” said Dorothy. She shoved her hands in the pail and Vanessa held the sheet, letting the dirty end drop into the water. It got scrubbed then Vanessa pulled it out, piling the rest of the sheet on her shoulder and I saw the water dripping down on her pants.
I thought for a moment of marrying both of them.
“Mrs. Belimeyer’s coming down the street,” a little kid yelled. He ran into the alley. He had seen her at the other end of the block. Considering he was fast and she was slow we had about four minutes to finish.
Dorothy and Vanessa held up the sheet. It looked very good, almost no brown at all. They stretched it out and said, “Put the water on it.”
Tommy aimed the hose that was attached to the faucet and hit the sheet but the water bounced off and hit the girls and me and Vinnie and Joey.
“Keep going,” said Dorothy.
The water hit the sheet some more then Joey said, “Enough.”
He grabbed the end and threw it over the line. He made it. Tommy and Vanessa took one end and started to pull. I jumped up and grabbed the end that was hanging over the line and pulled it down on the other side.
It came out straight. How did that happen? There were no clothespins on it, but it was hanging on the line and now blowing in the wind just as the back window opened and Mrs. Belimeyer stuck out her head.
“What’s going on here?” she said.
“Nothing, Mrs. Belimeyer,” said Joey.
“I know something is,” she said. “I don’t know what it is but it’s something.”
She started to pull in the line. No, don’t, we thought.
She reached out and touched the sheet. “How did this get wet?” she said with a very nasty voice.
“Don’t know,” said Vinnie. “We were just playing.”
“And where did my clothespins go?”
“Don’t know,” said Joey.
“Well, you kids did something and someday I’m going to catch you and you are all going to go to hell for being so bad.”
Then she pulled herself inside and closed the window.
“Did you hear that?” said Joey. “She doesn’t know what we did.”
We all started laughing and walked down the alley together. “She didn’t know.”
We laughed some more. Vanessa and Dorothy were the heroes, although heroes who were girls were called heroines then, but we couldn’t say it. The word was too big.
“Thanks, you two,” said Joey. “You saved us.”
We left the alley and put our arms around each other’s shoulders, including Dorothy’s and Vanessa’s. I held Dorothy. That was very nice.
“Sheets is fun,” said Vinnie. “Hope we can do it again soon.”
Size Doesn’t Matter
“You got a skate?” Johnny asked.
“Yeah, I got a skate, but just one,” said Buster.
“So let’s go skating.”
Johnny and Buster were sort of loners, except Buster was really a loner and Johnny was sometimes a loner. But on the other hand, Johnny could do anything so it did not matter that he stayed by himself a lot.
I know why he stayed by himself. He told me and told me not to tell anybody ever and I never did. You don’t get a secret and tell it or you’re no good. But I can tell it because his secret wasn’t true.
He had a small penis. That’s why he stayed by himself because if we ever had a peeing contest and he was there he would have to go into the contest and everyone would know his secret and laugh at him.
He said he would never be able to get married and never have kids and he wanted kids so he could teach them to make things.
Johnny and Buster went skating, coasting on one foot and pushing with the other. Most kids skated that way because it was impossible to keep two skates without one of them getting lost or stolen or the wheels on one of them getting so rusty they would never turn again.
That always happened when you put the skates away after it was raining and you put them in the basement because you were not allowed to keep them in your apartment. And you put one skate on top of the other so they would not get separated and then you came back two or three weeks later and the bottom wheels would not turn.
We knew that 3-In-One oil did not help. It made your fingers slippery, but the wheels still would not turn.
But then Johnny said he could do something. Every kid across the country heard about scooters that you could make from an old skate and a two-by-four and an orange crate. Every kid had heard about it, but not many really did it.
Except for Johnny. He became like a scooter factory one night. We had found some two-by-fours behind a factory and we could always get the wooden crates from in front of the grocery store on garbage day.
Johnny took apart some skates, oiled them, then nailed the front part with two wheels into the front of a two-by-four and nailed the back part with two wheels into the back of the wood.
Then he nailed the crate on the floorboard and even nailed some pieces of broomsticks at an angle on the top of the crate for steering.
It was so simple, but no one else had done it. We rode and raced and yelled and went over the cracks in the asphalt and got out of the way of cars and crashed into each other and had the best night of our lives.
Johnny also liked boats. That’s because his big brother was in the Navy. We never saw his big brother, but there were lots of pictures of him in a sailor uniform and in front of ships.
“I’m joining the Navy, too,” said Johnny.
But until he was old enough, he had his own Navy, though mostly they were just Popsicle sticks that he would float along the edge of the gutter after a rainstorm. The water came off the street, hit the curb and ran like a river to the sewers.
When there was a big rainstorm, the gutter ran with rapids. P
ut a stick in and you could barely keep up with it, running, picking it up when it got stuck behind a tire and then racing to the mouth of the sewer, trying to grab it just before it got sucked into the black hole of the bottomless pit that swallowed goldfish.
“It’s also called Davy Jones’ Locker,” said Johnny.
“What’s that?” asked Vinnie.
Johnny said he asked his brother one day when he was home on leave after his brother told him that he was lucky to have escaped Davy Jones’ Locker.
“It’s death, Johnny. It’s a funny word for when your ship gets torpedoed and you are swimming in the ocean and the sun is burning overhead and there are sharks and your shipmates say they see mermaids way off toward the horizon.”
“He said ‘then they swim away and you never see them again,’” Johnny said his brother told him.
“That sounds worse than being in the Army,” I said. “At least in the Army you just get shot and you’re dead right there. I don’t ever want to drown.”
Johnny was sharpening the end of a Popsicle stick with his pocket knife so it had a bow.
“I don’t care if I drown. I have a picture of my uncle steering a landing barge on D-Day. He wasn’t afraid and I’m not either,” Johnny said.
Sometimes Johnny tied two or three sticks together and sailed them. Sometimes he put a cigarette butt in front of his ships and let them try to catch it. The butt was the enemy submarine surfacing and his ship was the sub chaser.
“The sticks are like Corvettes, except America didn’t have any Corvettes,” he said. “But Corvettes were the fastest. The Canadians had lots of them. They were supposed to protect the convoys.”
Johnny knew a lot about ships. But one day he was alone and soaked after a storm – he had been out all day during the rain trying to get his ships going, first with a trickle of water, then with a torrent – when out of nowhere came a boot that kicked his Popsicle stick into the curb.
Johnny looked up in disbelief. No one had ever kicked his ships before. That’s not the way the gutter Navy works.
“I want this spot,” said Stan.
Stan was big, almost six feet. Johnny had not seen him since the kick-the-can incident. Stan had long, wet hair and wore a black motorcycle jacket. He was about five or six years older than us and lived in one of those apartments on the corner next to the El.
All we knew about Stan was that he had joined the Army, but he was back before basic training ended. We heard it was a medical discharge, but we didn’t believe it because there was nothing medically wrong with him.
He was just mean. Even after the night with kick the can, he was still mean. People don’t change after one game. We figured he was too mean even for the Army.
“I want your boats,” he told Johnny.
“Make your own,” said Johnny.
“I want yours, so get out of here.”
Johnny knew he could not fight Stan. But he also knew he was not going to back down and go away. His brother had told him you never back away from a fight, not in the Navy. And now the Navy was up against the Army.
“You’re going to be sorry,” said Johnny.
“Yeah? What are you going to do?”
Johnny stood up, leaving his sticks on the ground and said, “I’m just telling you, you’re going to be sorry.”
Stan made a fist. “Any time you want to try.”
Johnny went farther down the street. The water was running faster now and was almost two inches deep along the curb. He got half a block away. He could just see Stan squatting down getting ready to launch Johnny’s ships.
Johnny scooped up some dirt and gravel from under the water by the curb. His fingers got scratched and then a piece of glass cut him. The pain did not come until a moment later because of the cold water. The blood started oozing out. He thought of the billboards with the kids in iron lungs and knew that you could get polio from dirty water. Then he thought of Stan taking his ships and he shoved his hand back into the water and scooped up more pebbles and gum wrappers and cigarette butts and packed them into a dam. He hid it behind a tire then put some more dirt on top and wiped his hands on his pants.
The water hit the dam and made a right angle out into the street in the path of the delivery trucks.
Stan was running down the sidewalk at the edge of the curb trying to keep up with the Popsicle sticks. Johnny bent down between two parked cars just beyond of the dam and waited.
When Stan’s ships hit the dam, they changed direction in front of him and took off like torpedoes. Stan tried to grab them, but he was way too slow. The ships shot out into traffic and the aim and the timing were perfect, even if there was no aiming or timing beforehand. The ships went straight in front of the tire of a truck coming down the street and were crushed in an exploding, shattering instant that was too fast for Stan to stop.
Stan looked bewildered. Johnny stood up from three car lengths in front of him and gave one giant “Ha!”
“What did you do?” Stan shouted.
“That’s how the Navy takes care of the enemy,” Johnny shouted back. “My brother taught me that.”
Stan started to run around the car to hit him, but Johnny stood his ground and raised both his fists. Blood was running out of one of them.
“I’ll show you what else my brother taught me,” Johnny yelled.
Stan looked at the fists and the blood and the soaking wet kid standing in front of him and waved his hand down like he wouldn’t bother to fight him and turned around and walked away.
Johnny just stood there and watched him go. He could not wait to join the Navy.
He told me about Stan and I said once again, like I often did, as a joke to tease him, “Show me your penis.”
“No,” he said. “It’s small. And you probably are going to tell someone if you see it.”
“Will not,” I said. “When you’re in the Navy you’ll have to take showers with everyone and . . . ”
His face went blank. Before I finished talking I could see he didn’t think of that.
“So show me. Let’s have a peeing contest. Mine’s not so big either and maybe yours is the same size as mine.”
His face was still blank.
“Let’s go around the corner in the alley behind the garage behind Mrs. Belimeyer’s house and pee.”
Still blank.
“Come on. You’ll have to do it when you’re in the Navy so do it now and I’ll tell you.”
He walked. But he didn’t talk. He walked like someone going to the electric chair. I always figured I knew how people walked to the electric chair because two years earlier my uncle tried to get me into the Cub Scouts – one evening, I was with a bunch of kids in the church basement for the meeting and there was a big picture of Jesus on the wall when someone said, “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were just fried.”
The Scout leaders cheered.
We knew the Rosenbergs were supposed to be spies for the Russians and gave them atomic secrets, but every kid also knew that the government never really proved they did that. We heard the stories that they were innocent and stories are always true, or almost true.
But some of the boys who were waiting for the Scout meeting to start began walking under the picture of Jesus pretending they were going to the electric chair. They waddled back and forth because their legs were in chains.
Then they sat down on the hard metal chairs against the wall where the picture of Jesus was hung and they turned on the electricity and shouted, “Zap. Agghhh. Agghhh, again.” And they squirmed and jerked in the chairs until the Scout master said, “Stop that silliness. They got what they deserved. And now get up and act like Scouts.”
Except for the chair, that’s the way Johnny was walking now.
“Come on. I bet you’ve never been in a peeing contest.”
He shook his head.
We got behind the garage.
“Take out your thing,” I said.
He shook his head.
“We can’t have a
peeing contest if you don’t take out your thing,” I said. “I’ll take mine out first.”
I unzipped and pulled out my penis. He watched.
“Now yours. I’m not going to do it for you.”
He unzipped, slowly. He reached in and I saw his face go up to the sky as he pulled out his penis.
“That’s almost the same size as mine,” I said.
He looked down. His eyes went from mine to his, back to mine, back to his.
He almost smiled.
“But you said yours was not so big and mine’s smaller,” he said.
“Well, it’s different sizes all day long, you know. It depends on if I’m running or scared or thinking of Vanessa undressing.”
I felt like a teacher. I was giving a lesson to Johnny but I was thinking how could anyone not know that?
“We got to pee now. Who can get the furthest over that line. You got to pee?”
“A little,” he said.
“Well, try.”
I squeezed and my pee came out over the line on the concrete and then Johnny’s came out and went further than mine.
“If yours goes further it means yours is stronger,” I said.
I looked to see if he heard me but on his face was a look of horror. Then I saw what he saw, Mrs. Belimeyer coming down alongside the garage, which was our only escape route.
“I caught you, I finally caught you, you sick, rotten kids. You are homosexuals. That’s what you are. I’m telling everyone.”
She was shouting. We were trying to stop peeing and put our penises back but it was impossible to stop peeing that quickly and get them back inside and get zipped up and I was peeing on my hand while my hand was trying to push myself back inside and I could feel the pee running down my leg.
“I saw you two going in here. I knew you were up to no good. Now I’m telling your mothers.”
Johnny looked like the electricity was going through the chair and he was sitting on it. I looked down and saw the stain on his pants was down to his knee. I was still trying to pull up my zipper. Nothing could be worse than this minute.
“Owwww,” I screamed. I caught the skin of my penis in my zipper.
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