by Tara Clancy
Finally the umpire and coaches meet out on the mound, and they are out there for what feels like forever until, ultimately, they all agreed—as it turned out, there was no written rule against sliding on asphalt, so the call stayed. The move, however, was officially deemed “a pretty stupid idea,” and they gave us all some shit about never doing it again. Little did they know, it was too late—right then and there, we had rechristened ourselves Our Lady of Perpetual Scrapes. The revolution had begun.
—
As it turns out, sliding on asphalt doesn’t really involve much sliding. Done perfectly, you travel a couple of inches, tearing a hole in your pants as you go and skidding to a stop with only the first layer of skin removed. Done wrong, you either need a dozen stitches or you hit the ground with such impact that you instantly stop dead, then crab-walk the rest of the way in shame. In either case, you’re left with a bruise the size of Connecticut, but if you are an eleven-year-old girl in the CYO bantam division of 1991 playing on asphalt, you succeed time after time, because no one expects you to care enough to try—99 percent of the time, they never even see you coming! And I know because, following this game, damn near every girl on my team would go on to do it.
My first time was a few games later. I was rounding toward home, head down in a full-tilt sprint, just a few steps away from the plate, when I looked up, just in time to see the throw come in. The catcher was ready to tag me, so I did a swan dive right up and over her. And then I came down, headfirst.
My lights went out for a few seconds, and then—blink, blink, blink—Dad is standing above me, waving two fingers in front of my face, steam coming out of his ears. The first thing I say is, “So!?” And he says, “I don’t think it’s a concussion.” And I say, “No! Not that!” He doesn’t get it. I say again, “SO???” And his head keeps shaking, but it goes from signaling confusion to you-gotta-be-kiddin’-me astonishment. “OH, FOR PETE’s—Safe! You were safe, ya nut!”
—
We girls of the Catholic Youth Organization fast-pitch softball league played on “hardtop” for no other reason than that we were girls. Even the nine-year-old boys’ baseball teams—whose pitchers’ 45-mph fastballs barely matched ours—outranked us and were given dominion over the city’s few dirt fields. And we were relegated to New York’s least desirable playing fields—and the most dangerous. This fateful Sliding on Asphalt year, we were eleven—little but not too little to know that this was seriously fucked up. And so we were easily possessed by the spirit of the desperation play: to win, to shock the grandmas and piss off the moms, to impress the dads, to prove that we could play as hard as the boys, but more than anything to prove that we could play as hard as one another.
—
As it turned out, the timing couldn’t have been better. Just a few months after the end of that softball season, I started middle school, where knowing how to play hard and being prepared to face-plant onto asphalt was not an option but a necessity.
I’m looking down, minding my own business, kicking up pebbles in the middle of the gray concrete yard at Middle School 172, when a pair of running, screaming girls clip my arm. My eyes shoot up—these girls are not so much holding hands as damn near ripping each other’s arms out of the sockets as they pass, chanting, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” I bounce onto my tiptoes to watch as they clothesline their way through the crowd in front of me and then jump, arms wide, into a huddle of kids I hadn’t noticed before in a far corner of the yard. “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” I spin around. The other three-hundred-some-odd sixth-graders playing in the yard behind me are now just a sea of planted feet and perked heads, dead still for a solid second, until—whoosh!—they stampede.
Cartons of cafeteria milk and candy wrappers blow back behind them, and basketballs and handballs bounce away on their own, as the entire tidal wave speeds straight in my direction, hurtling a growing minefield of chucked backpacks in its wake. Oh, shit. I backpedal away, then pivot and dip into a full sprint, heading for the knee-high concrete wall that anchors the twenty-foot chain-link fence along the perimeter of the yard. Another dozen kids have the same idea, and some perch on the concrete base, necks straining to see what’s going on, while others scale the fence sideways, Spider-Man style, for an even better view.
The fight chant is peppered with screams of pain and a chorus of “Fuck you, bitch!” The heads of the massive circle of kids surrounding whoever’s fighting windshield-wipe at mach speed, letting out louder and louder “oohs” and “aahs.” I can’t see anything until the swarm moves all the way to the fence, and then, just ten feet ahead of me, I see a girl lift the loose bottom end of the chain-link with her left hand and shove the head of another girl underneath it with her right. The standing girl pummels the body of the trapped-by-the-neck, nearly guillotined girl for as long as it takes the team of security guards, blowing their whistles and spreading the crowd with their batons, to push through and wrestle the aggressor to the ground.
It is my first day of sixth grade, my first year in middle school. I am eleven. So are those two girls.
—
There are about a thousand kids in MS 172, from the sixth to the eighth grade, but only half of them actually want to beat the shit out of one another. The other half just look like they do.
Our school’s population contains at least one member of nearly every ethnic and religious group, native New Yorkers and recent immigrants alike, with no clear majority, though the Indian kids were the newest addition to the neighborhood. Their official arrival was marked by one of my favorite, distinctly New York City phenomena—the sudden appearance of their favorite snack food, alongside that of the next most recent immigrant group, in the Key Food specialty section.
I still remember shopping there with Grandma, back when I was in PS 133, when she spotted a box of jelly candies, technically Bhagat’s Keshar Badam Halwa with Saffron, sitting next to the red tin cubes of Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies. Grandma flagged down a lady in a sari. “Eh! These any good?” The lady nodded and smiled. “They are sweet.”
“I like sweet,” Grandma said, throwing a box into her cart.
“And these?” the woman in the sari asked, pointing at the tin boxes of cookies.
“Sweet,” Grandma said. So the lady took a box of those, as well—two people from very different parts of the world, brought together, if only for a second, by an exchange of their ridiculously cumbersomely named desserts.
—
Some of the kids who go to MS 172 live in apartments above the storefronts on Jamaica Avenue, or the Glen Oaks town houses. Others have small houses in Bellerose or big ones in Hollis Hills. But none of that means much, because it is Queens in 1991. And so, no matter where you’re from, how much money you’ve got, or whether you are more inclined to guillotine a girl with a chain-link fence or join the chess club, everyone worships at the same altar: hip-hop.
Freckle-faced white girls wear their hair in slick-backed ponytails. Baby-faced black boys peek out from low-brimmed leather baseball caps. Chinese girls rock brown lip liner. Israeli boys wear Hilfiger button-downs, their gold-charm Hebrew Chai symbols hanging in the vee of their still-hairless chests (substitute Irish four-leaf clovers, Italian horns, Boricua flags, Jordan jersey number 23’s, Yankee pendants, ankhs, Ganeshas, Shivas, or Oms, accordingly). And everybody has at least one Hugo Boss sweatshirt—if not a real one, then a pretty good knockoff.
Nadira Gonzales, president of the student council and lead in this year’s production of Oliver!, otherwise channels Mary J. Blige in a Nautica puffy jacket, door-knocker earrings, and Timberlands. And Renita Samuel, who just a year ago, back when we were in PS 133, wore saris or matching polka-dotted short sets and jellies, now sports Knicks jerseys, Jordans, and a feigned bad-bitch scowl. For these most recent Indian immigrant kids, the transformation from acclimating American elementary school students to LL Cool J–wannabe middle school students especially stood out: some, like Renita, nailed the look; others, like Amul, missed by an inch t
hat might as well have been a mile—he came to his first day of sixth grade at MS 172 in jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of piss-poor rip-off Nikes called Shooters, and he took hell for it.
—
As always, Dad took me sneaker shopping on Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill before school started that year. He had just moved into his first proper house barely across the Nassau border in the suburban town of Valley Stream, marking the first time in his forty-one years he had lived outside of Queens County. He didn’t know of a sneaker store in his new neighborhood, but even if he had, Dad was of the old-school New York variety that would drive clear across the city to avoid spending money at a place where he didn’t know the owner’s name, his or her kids’ names, and how they took their coffee.
We stopped at Marlowe Jewelers first. We weren’t in the market for jewelry that day, or most other days we went shopping on Liberty, but Dad was close friends with everybody who worked there—“Slim,” “Cha-tze,” Dennis—so, from as early an age as I can remember, we always popped by with coffee and donuts and spent a half hour shooting the shit.
I so loved going to Marlowe’s with Dad that it’s preserved in my memory as clearly as Grandma’s kitchen on 251st Street, or our old little house in Broad Channel: the way the glass jewelry cases and motorized, spinning watch displays rattled every time the elevated A train passed overhead; the deep, terrifying barks of Kiki (their German shepherd guard dog) whenever a new face came through the shop door; the nail-studded bat mounted on the back wall (if it weren’t for the LOUISVILLE SLUGGER logo, you’d swear that thing had survived the gladiator contests of the Middle Ages).
While Dad chitchatted with Slim and Dennis, I eyed the nameplate necklaces that half the girls in my sixth-grade class already had. I waited until we were about to leave to point them out to Dad. “Christmas?” I asked. I got a “Maybe,” which was more than enough to light me up.
We shot a wave to Manny in the window of G & R Electronics as we passed by, and then we headed into the sneakers shop. Dad got straight to talking baseball with Myron, the owner, while I tried on pair after pair—Ewings, Nike Air Maxes, Bo Jacksons, Filas, all-white high-top Reeboks with gum soles—staring at my feet in the little floor mirror for five, ten minutes apiece, then walking circles around the benches in the middle of the shop, then sidling back to the mirror, until Dad couldn’t take it anymore, “For the love of God, Scooter, just pick a damn pair! I don’t get you kids and this sneaker shit these days.” I went for the Reeboks, then pushed my luck. “Eh, Da, any chance we could check if Sukon’s got the Shockwaves in before we go home? They said they were coming this month.”
For all my wannabe-tough-city-kid style, I was only eleven—young enough to still be collecting G.I. Joe figurines, old enough to know, after seeing that fight on my first day of sixth grade, that I needed to make more friends at MS 172 if I wanted to avoid getting my ass kicked.
—
Lynette Solina wore the unique dual crown of prettiest and toughest girl in our whole sixth-grade class. And even though Esther and I still faced no competition for the “weirdest” label, midway through that year Lynette had turned our best-friend twosome into a threesome.
We sat together every day in the cafeteria and spent the entire first week of our friendship seeing who could keep a Cry Baby Extra Sour Gumball in her mouth the longest, and talking about Jimmy, Lynette’s infamous first boyfriend from earlier that year. Jimmy was technically in seventh grade, a year ahead of us, but he had been left back so many times, he was fourteen (to our eleven). And for reasons no one understood, one day he walked into the yard with a BB gun and shot two kids in their asses.
We knew that the recess fight riots at 172 were a daily thing, but this episode still took the cake. And even though Jimmy was immediately expelled, we panicked that he might come back anyway. So we hypothesized on what Lynette should do if he did. Esther, true to form, i.e., petrified, ventured: “You didn’t ever really break up with him, Lynette, right? Maybe you can’t! It might make him mad! What if he comes after you!? You’re stuck!”
“Yeah! You probably have to marry him now, just so he doesn’t shoot you, too!” I chimed in, trying to be funny and act tough, though the truth was, I was scared shitless. But Lynette didn’t seem fazed in the least: “You kiddin’ me? I’m done with him. I’ll tell him right to his face! Just let him try ’n’ shoot me!”
She wasn’t faking it. Lynette was a take-no-shit, eleven-going-on-eighteen, middle-school, Italian American version of Tina (Rosie Perez) in Do the Right Thing. But it wouldn’t take long for me to see that she was as caring as she was fierce, just like the rest of the Solinas.
Lynette’s parents grew up in the Pink Houses—a housing project in East New York, Brooklyn—but made their way to a co-op apartment in Hollis, Queens, just before Lynette and her two younger sisters were born. (Whether in East New York in the ’70s or in Hollis in the ’80s, the Solinas were one of the few Italian American families living in predominately African American neighborhoods.) John, Lynette’s dad, managed the produce department at the King Kullen supermarket. Antonetta, her mom, worked part-time as a receptionist in a doctor’s office on Hillside Avenue and part-time selling real estate but still made time to cook three-course Italian dinners most nights and full-on feasts on the weekends—beautifully arranged platters of antipasto, tray after tray of eggplant parmigiana, fresh pesto pasta, perfectly crisp breaded chicken cutlets, and homemade zeppoles for dessert.
The Solinas’ dinner table on a Saturday night was the microcosm to the macrocosm of Queens—the most ethnically diverse, and delicious, place in the world. In addition to their family of five, Antonetta always extended an open invitation to their neighbors, their Brooklyn family, a bunch of Lynette’s sisters’ friends, and—by the end of sixth grade—Esther and me. The dinner table was right inside the front door to their apartment, which they kept unlocked for a good four hours on Saturday night, and every few minutes a new face poked in and everyone screamed, “HEY!,” and then we all got up and jockeyed around the chairs until we were all eating elbow-to-elbow.
Even my mom got in on the action one night. And, soon afterward, she and Lynette’s mom became as close friends as their daughters were. Antonetta and Carmella—seven syllables of pure Brooklyn Italian joy. And with that, the Solinas became, and remained, a second family to me.
—
By the start of seventh grade, Lynette, Esther, and I had anointed ourselves the L.E.T. crew—gel-curling our hair and tweezing our eyebrows together in our rooms after school, listening to Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” and Tupac’s “I Get Around” on repeat. We weren’t then, nor would we ever be, bad enough to actually graffiti our tag on brick walls, but we did take a can of black spray paint to a hidden back corner of my closet one day, spraying L.E.T. Crew, L.E.T. Forever! and L.E.T. inside a lightning bolt.
Throughout our years at MS 172 we were always more chess club than chain-link chokers—but we did catch one beef, with another group of girls, at the end of seventh grade. It never came to actual blows, if for no other reason than because Lynette was so willing to throw down. “What? You want to fight? So do it! Either you stop talking shit and just hit me, or we dead it! Enough with this in-between shit!”
Lynette fought fire with fire. Esther fought it by avoiding eye contact in the cafeteria. I fought it in a cloak of bad-girl style—I got the nameplate necklace, a name ring the next year, and continued to drive Dad bat-shit with my sneaker obsession. If all else failed, though, both Esther and I fought fire by standing back at a safe distance—which just meant, throughout the eighth grade and for pretty much the rest of our lives, anywhere behind Lynette.
The summer before I started high school, when I was fourteen, my mother planned a trip that—unbeknownst to me but not to her—was less a vacation than a pilgrimage. As with similar missions, Mom expected ours would bring about an awakening in me, although not one of the more typical spiritual or religious variety but, rather, the s
exual type. Ergo, our destination wasn’t Nazareth or Bethlehem or the remote burial site of some obscure Christian martyr, but the grand sepulchre of all sexual inhibitions, the mausoleum of many a Midwestern boy’s feigned interest in the NFL, that enormous tomb of all formerly closeted selves: the Great Gay Motherland of West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Mom was taking me to visit a living relic, otherwise known as her only lesbian friend, to see if basking in this friend’s lavender light might make me realize what Mom had long since guessed was true: that I was one, too.
I had heard this friend’s name mentioned over the years, but it wasn’t until we were on the plane that she told me anything more substantial. It was Mom’s freshman year at St. Joseph’s College back in Brooklyn when she first met her—a sharp, rebellious, alcoholic, soon-to-be-heroin-addict, giant butch built of tough Rockaway Irish stock named, of all things, Rosemary. (That is not exactly how Mom described her, but that is exactly what she was. I know because, well, it takes one to know one, but—more blatantly—that’s how she described herself. In fact, soon after we met, Rosemary told me that even being seen with an out butch lesbian in a Catholic school in 1960s Brooklyn was something none of the other girls was willing to do—Mom was her first, and only, college friend.)
As it turns out, my dad had met Rosemary in the Rockaway bar scene years before either of them met my mom, and Rosemary was the matchmaker on that fateful night at McNulty’s. (Back then, as was the case years later, when Dad started hanging out with those few gay guy couples at Gregory’s, the only qualification you needed for his friendship was the ability to handle your drinks and his jokes.)
By 1994, the year we flew across the country for a visit, Mom and Rosemary had been friends for over two decades. At some point in the last half of those twenty-plus years, Rosemary had sobered up and moved to L.A….though I doubt in that order. She now had a job at “a shop.” That seemingly inconsequential, but truly pivotal, tidbit was the last thing Mom said to me as we were de-boarding the plane. She mentioned it in passing, as in, “Dolly, Rosemary has to work today—and she works at a shop—so after we land, we’ll go straight there and hang out till she gets off work. Okay?” I barely recall this detail registering with me, until, that is, our airport taxi pulled up in front of said “shop.” After that point, I would never, ever forget it.