“Ha, we’re gonna win,” said one of Rocky’s gang. Then he spit on the ground. We didn’t spit, none of us spit, at least not after Dorothy said that was disgusting. Then he spit again and pushed me.
I turned around to hit him.
“No fighting,” shouted the Greek who was a snowman. I remembered Miss Johnson saying it was always warm in Greece, so I didn’t know how they knew how to work in the cold.
“No fighting, just racing,” he shouted again.
But the race was bad. Rocky’s boxes were moving at the bottom, and Joey’s were only getting pushed aside halfway down.
“We’re never gonna let you back here,” said another one of Rocky’s guys. “Never, never, never.”
It hurt. It hurt a lot because we knew it was true. Next summer would come and we could walk up and down our street, but we could never go around the corner. We could see the edge of the boxes from our street, but we would just watch them swimming in them while we walked back and forth.
“Hurry, Joey, hurry,” we shouted. We got close and banged on the fence. “Hurry.”
Vanessa crossed her fingers.
Rocky’s gang spit more and hit each other. “Ha. Say goodbye to this.”
“Hurry, Joey,” said Vinnie. “You’re stronger than even my fadder.”
But Rocky was starting to go back up while Joey still had not reached bottom. Once they claimed this for their own that would be the end. It would be theirs. We might sneak in while they weren’t there, but it wouldn’t be any fun because we would know that any minute they might come down the block and if they caught us it would be another fight and you can’t have fun if you are worried about fighting.
We saw Rocky’s boxes moving as he was going up. He was five feet off the ground and Joey still had another couple of boxes to get through before he could turn around.
“Hurry, Joey.”
Then, suddenly, Rocky’s boxes started moving backwards. He was going down again.
We stared.
“Hey, Rocky, go the other way,” one of his guys shouted.
We heard a muffled yell from Rocky, but no one could ever hear words from inside the boxes.
Joey got to the bottom and started back up. We knew how tough that was. You try to grab something and step on something and pull yourself up, and push the boxes aside from over your head, but sometimes your foot goes inside a box, and sometimes it flips over and the edge bangs into your shin and sometimes the whole box collapses. But he was climbing.
Rocky was going up again, but about five feet up, just about up to our heads, the movement in the boxes suddenly reversed and it seemed like he was swimming down.
“Go, Joey, go.”
More muffled yells came from Rocky.
Joey was moving up. Rocky was rising, but then went down again.
Then Junior yelled. It was more a squeal than a yell. It was a box-piercing squeal and for a moment Joey’s boxes stopped. Then, like Superman was suddenly in there, Joey’s boxes moved like he was running up through them.
Rocky’s boxes moved up, then down again.
Joey’s arm stuck up through the top of the boxes and then he pulled himself high enough to get his head and chest out of the cardboard. He looked down and we were cheering. Junior got caught up in the action and was clapping.
The Greek leaned over the edge of the roof and grabbed Joey by the arms and pulled him out of the ocean and stood him on the roof.
“The winner,” said the Greek and held up Joey’s arm. It looked just like the cover of the book I read and I thought maybe somebody up there liked us. I wasn’t sure if the up there was on the roof or in the sky.
At Rocky’s end, there was a lot of yelling and boxes moving. Then Rocky crawled out through the hole in the bottom of the fence. He was covered in chocolate syrup.
“Not fair,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
In a minute, Joey and the Greek came out through the factory door.
“It’s a do over,” said Rocky. “This isn’t fair.”
The Greek did not laugh. He did not smile. But while Rocky was talking he slowly shook his head left then right, then again.
“It’s a do over,” said Rocky again. “Either we have another race, and Joey goes on this side, or we fight.”
“No fight,” said the Greek. “No race again.”
“You can’t tell me nothing,” said Rocky as he wiped his hands on his pants.
The Greek took his ice hook off his neck.
“You can’t tell us nothing,” Rocky said again.
The Greek reached out with the hook and with an aim I could not believe, he slid the point under Rocky’s shirt and then he pulled the hook back and lifted it, with Rocky getting lifted with it.
Rocky tried to swing his fist, but the Greek lifted him higher with one hand, and the chocolate-covered Rocky with his chest held up by the hook of a giant in a white parka looked very funny.
“No fighting, or I fight you,” the Greek said to him.
“Let me down.”
It looked like the Greek could hold Rocky in the air as long as he wanted. He must have lifted a lot of ice in the freezer because now he was smiling as he held Rocky. Then Rocky’s shirt ripped and he fell to the sidewalk.
“You ruined my shirt. You owe me a shirt,” yelled Rocky.
“You ruined my coffee break,” said the Greek. “One shirt for one coffee break.”
Rocky got up and said, “We’ll be back and you’ll be sorry.”
He was saying that more to us than to the Greek.
“You come back and I will hook more than your shirt,” said the Greek. “You never come back. Never. You hear me? Now go.”
Sometimes just the right tone and an ice pick and a thick moustache and long eyebrows can make a point that parents and teachers never achieve.
Rocky started walking away, dripping chocolate behind him. He turned around a couple of times and his friends were spitting a lot on the ground as they left, but they did leave. The Greek said nothing to us. He turned around and went back through the door and back to the freezer.
Joey made sure Junior was okay and gave him a box to play with. Then we climbed the fence and got back on the roof. We could just see Rocky and his gang turning the corner under the El. The chances of them coming back were small. No. They would never be back. A gang was not as strong as an ice hook in the hands of a Greek.
“Hey, look at this,” shouted Johnny.
Johnny did not often shout. He was standing on the roof above where Rocky had gone down. We ran over the tar and gravel and saw what he was pointing to. It was an empty five gallon can of chocolate syrup.
“The Greek fixed the race,” said Joey.
“But why?” asked Jimmy Lee.
“He likes us,” said Dorothy. “He always watches us.”
We said nothing. It was like something really important had happened to us. It was like one of those miracles they told us about in church of walking on water or feeding a lot of people with just a couple of bottles of wine and few loaves of Wonder Bread.
“Someday I’m going to Greece to swim in the real Mediterranean Ocean,” said Dorothy.
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
“Sure, everyone can come.”
That wasn’t as good as going alone, but I was still happy she said I could go.
We spent the rest of the day and all the next day and the next day swimming. Then the summer ended and the factory closed and the Greeks got laid off and the boxes got taken away and not replaced. Then winter came, and the years went by.
Last, Last Chapter
Forty years after I watched the great basketball game in my mind, the one where we all played and the hoop got flattened, I walked around the corner to the ice cream factory. It now made long, black steel pipes. There were a couple of abandoned and stripped-down cars, no wheels, no seats, no doors.
The fenced-in cardboard enclosure was gone. A stack of pipes about twenty feet long were strapped toget
her and piled up on the sidewalk.
The street was greasy and oily. Men in coveralls were loading pipes on flatbed trucks farther down the street.
I had learned that Dorothy had gotten married to someone from another neighbourhood, had three kids and then was abandoned by her husband. She lived a hard life.
Vanessa had become a nun. That almost made me feel bad about wanting to see her naked.
Buster went to Vietnam with the Marines and was killed.
Tommy married someone from another neighbourhood named Dotty, for Dorothy, and moved to California to drive potato chip delivery trucks for his uncle. He was never heard from again.
Johnny joined the Navy, then moved to Florida, got married and had three kids. He taught the neighbourhood kids how to build scooters and boats made from Popsicle sticks.
Jimmy Lee, as I told you in the chapter called “Gone Fishing,” got married when he was seventeen, had two kids by the time he was nineteen and died of a heart attack while he was jogging when he was twenty-two. Amazing how life is not fair, and also amazing how, to me, we are still fishing together on the street over the sewer.
Vinnie disappeared, at least from my world.
And Joey did too. I tried to find him but even with Facebook and Google it was useless. Then two years ago, I got a note from my cousin, the one who moved out into the hallway when my mother and I moved in. He said he read in a newsletter from a tire company he once worked for that a longtime employee, Joe Colacioppo, had died.
He said a dozen years earlier he and Joe had been talking and they discovered they had a common link, me. Funny. Then it passed. One of those things you hear, then forget about, until you are reminded.
Back on the street, the elevated train had been taken down and now had many trees planted on it.
I saw one boy, mixed with a bunch of races, riding a bicycle.
“Hey, I used to live here,” I said to him.
He stopped, then with his feet on the ground, backed away from me.
“I just want to know what you do here? For fun, I mean.”
“Just play video games,” he said. “I gotta go.”
He got on his bike and quickly rode away.
I looked at the place where the cardboard used to be. Because this is now the computer age, I looked up Bungalow Bar on Google. You can do the same. It was started by a Greek who escaped from Europe right before World War II.
“Thank you, Mr. Greek,” I said. “Let me repeat that: Thank you.”
This photo of a Bungalow Bar Ice Cream truck abandoned at Broad Channel in Jamaica Bay was taken in 1973. I possibly, probably, washed that very truck for twenty-five cents. It is the right year, 1953—you can tell by the back fenders. They used those trucks for about three years. It was beautiful then and it still is.
B.C. — Before Computer Games
Always Tell the Truth
The B.C. Years: Before Computer Games
Getting There
Finally, There
Staying Alive
Gone Fishing
Cell Phones Without Batteries
Rooftop Rated XXX
The Greatest Game Ever Played
Battle Wounds
You Just Got to Help
Stumpy
Kick the Can
Save the Celery
The First Shave
Dying for a Smoke
Milk is Good for You, If You Don’t Get Caught
Johnny Ride a Pony
Real Make-Believe Sex
Rock Paper Scissors. Slap
Christmas Eve
The Day After Christmas Eve
The Strongest Men on Earth
The Party
The Queen of Marbles
White Christmas, Don’t Be Silly
Urban Farmer
The Forest
Missing the Train
Delivering the News
Setting the Pins
Poison
Laundry Day
Size Doesn’t Matter
The Arms Race
World War
Them Wonderful Bums
Changing the World
The World Series
Last Chapter
Last, Last Chapter
Cardboard Ocean Page 30