It took me sixty years to understand.
We liked Mr. Ruddy, but we secretly made fun of him. It was hard for us not to make fun of Mr. Huff as well. He operated the only electric-motor shop for miles and was considered a marvel at all sorts of repairs. Friendly, honest and soft spoken, his picture also adorned Mr. Ruddy’s gallery of honor.
Back then kids like us idolized baseball stars like Joe DiMaggio. But when we stared at the photo of the young George Huff, standing, bat in hand, the champion hitter of his 1916 high-school baseball team, we couldn’t comprehend it was the same man before us. He had aged far beyond his time, his face drooping slightly to the right, a gift of shell shock and a severe concussion sustained in the trenches of Lorraine. I later learned that he never slept without awakening in screaming fits.
The third man, like Mr. Ruddy confined to a wheel chair, always tried to stand and shake our hands when we entered the shop. Mr. Brown was our neighbor. He lived in the tenement next door. He was younger than Mr. Ruddy and Mr. Huff—though only by several months—but the mark of time and the effects of German gas warfare had aged him in ways that the other men could only observe from a distance.
His sepia-tinted photo on the wall showed a slender, long-legged track star with shags of dark-brown hair cow-licking his forehead. Now we saw a sunken-chested, white-haired old man with scarred skin and labored breathing from almost non-existent lungs. Even the missing legs and wandering mind of his friends proved no match for the living death he endured: perpetual breathlessness, a near-suffocation that never ended.
It was to Mr. Huff’s credit, and the friendship bordering on love among the three men, that twice weekly he would push Mr. Brown’s wheelchair slowly down the street to Mr. Ruddy’s shop. Often I wondered whether Angie and Tomas and I would be friends so much later in life.
Surviving them both by more than five decades, I still wonder.
The fourth Old Guy in the room appeared only by photo. The first time we stared at the picture-laden wall we saw four strapping boys—perhaps young men is more appropriate—standing close together in athletic clothes, arms interlocking across shoulders, smiling and staring out into an unknown future. When Mr. Ruddy saw us, he hoisted himself, monkey-like, onto the counter where he would place the repaired shoes for pickup by their owners.
“Boys, I know you’re wondering, so I’m gonna tell you. See that other kid? That’s Tommy Seidletz. The four of us signed up together, and together we all faced down the Huns in France. And at one turn or another, Tommy saved each of our lives.”
He paused for just a second, and I thought I saw his eyes begin to water, but maybe it was just a trick of the light. Then he smiled, and those blue eyes flashed, as he raised a beer bottle in salute, and the two other Old Guys did the same. He spoke very quietly.
“Tommy took a bullet for me the day before my legs decided to walk away.”
He looked out his storefront window pointed.
“Boys, see that lady there?”
We looked. It was the Crazy Lady. Everyone knew her. White-haired, pushing a baby carriage with a watering can under a baby blanket, she walked up and down the street, stopping passersby and asking if they had seen her little boy. Even Papa knew her and would tell me at the dinner table always to respect her. She had lost a son in the Great War. And even in that neighborhood of want, the Crazy Lady never went without food or shelter.
Mr. Ruddy touched my shoulder. In a whisper he said, “That’s Tommy’s mother.”
We sat for a while longer, as the Old Guys drank and reminisced. Their war stories always excited us and conjured up images of our charging a machine-gun nest or hurling grenades over barbed-wire barricades. But we were also ten year-olds, and long attention spans were not our strong suit.
Mr. Brown saw us fidget, and he reached into his vest pocket, gasping out in his oxygen-starved and chemically scarred voice, “Here, guys, catch!”
Ah, the memory of us scrambling for those pennies makes me laugh even now. I still have mine. They were special pennies, with the head of an American Indian or an eagle in flight. It wasn’t until much later in life that I found out they were collectors’ items. I wonder what happened to Angie’s and Tomas’s pennies.
Mr. Huff took the hint and strapped Mr. Brown into his wheelchair. Then he picked up the empty bottles and lined them up like the dead soldiers that they were. When we were sure the men had finished with them, we picked up the bottles—worth two cents each at the local beer distributor—and headed out the door into the cold. Mr. Huff tucked a blanket around Mr. Brown’s chest and wheeled him outside. Mr. Ruddy, ever smiling, waved goodbye to all of us.
Walking home, Tomas, who had been quiet all the while, suddenly smiled.
“Hey, guys, doesn’t the coal man come today?”
I had forgotten about it. Maybe the numbing cold in my bedroom had frozen my brain. Sure, that’s what happened! The building had run out of coal. It wasn’t unusual. The only time owners paid attention to their tenements was when rents were due.
“Let’s go! Maybe he’s still there.”
We ran across the bridge over the small river running through the neighborhood. Then we heard it: the groaning motor and grinding brakes of the big truck carrying tons of coal to fuel the tenement furnaces. It was stopping in front of my building.
We saw the big, soot-covered, glove-wearing man extend the metal sluice from the back of the truck. He walked toward a heavy, cast iron cover that concealed a chute into the basement. As we approached, he lifted the cover and guided the sluice from the truck into the opening. When he noticed us he flashed a gap-tooth smile.
“Stay back, kids, lotta soot gonna come out soon!”
His moon-round face reminded me of the members of the Polish family down the street.
Like magic we saw him pull a lever, and the back of the truck started to rise. As it did the thunderous hoofs of thousands of coal lumps funneled down the sluice and into the chute, colliding and bouncing and raising a thick plume. Despite his warning we got closer and cheered the black diamonds rolling downward.
Soon the moon-dark man pulled the lever again and truck’s bed settled back down. He took a shovel and pushed the remaining pieces into the open chute then took a rounded-fringe broom and brushed the sluice. When he had finished he folded it back into the truck, climbed in, and waved to us, as he moved it to the next building.
Now it was nearing lunchtime, and each of us felt the rumblings in our guts. We waved each other away, yelling out that we’d meet later.
I ran inside, climbing the four flights of stairs and pushing open our apartment door. I remember the look on my mother’s face: a mixture of disapproval, laughter and feigned horror at my sooty face and hands.
“Berto, go wash your hands and change your clothes. Now!”
I went to my room and stripped to my long johns. I paused and looked out the window. Down on the street the coal man again was replacing the sluice onto his truck after finishing next door. Then he looked up and, to this day, I swear he saw me standing at the window and waved at me. He climbed into the truck and drove off.
Only minutes later, when I had put on relatively clean clothes and was heading toward the kitchen, I heard shouting coming from outside. My mother went to the window and opened it, and the voice of Mrs. Brown, Tim Brown’s wife, shrieked in the cold air.
Mama ran to the living room, where my father was sitting, feet, propped up, and whispered in his ear. He stood up more quickly than I thought possible, grabbed his coat, and ran out the door. I heard his feet stomping down the squeaky stairway and the front door of the building open and slam shut.
I went to the kitchen and saw my mother sitting at the table, her head in her hands.
“Mamma, che ha torto?”
Mama, what’s wrong?
She shook her head and said nothing.
In a little while I heard Papa’s heavy steps, slower now, climbing the stairs. When he entered the apartment, Mama looked up a
t him. He shook his head
“Il vecchio Signor Brown appena è morto.”
Old Mr. Brown just died.
To this day I remember those words.
The memories they stir in me are a mixed and varied lot. By the time I was ten I had seen death in the knife fights on Hamilton Street. I had even tried to help, to stop the outflow of the red river of life from those slashed and cut. But these were the deaths of strangers.
I knew Mr. Brown. I liked Mr. Brown. He was one of the Old Guys. And now there would be one fewer member at those meetings in Mr. Ruddy’s shoe-repair shop.
Later in my life, my father’s words from that day struck another chord.
He had called him “Old Mr. Brown.” Back then, old meant someone in their forties, maybe even fifty. It was not usual for men to live too long, whatever that meant. Old Mr. Brown wasn’t more than forty-eight.
But, dear reader, there is one final memory, one that haunts me even now. Was it a trick of the imagination, an overactive ten-year-old boy’s flight of fancy? Or did I really see it?
That moment, when the coal man looked up at me and waved, another person in his truck also looked up, smiled, and waved: Timothy Brown.
The ’Bo
When I was ten I wanted to run away from home.
Not that I was unhappy or mistreated—far from it. When I was ten I had gotten the wanderlust from listening to Thomas the barber wax poetic about his worldly adventures after leaving Mother Russia.
I wanted to see places, places I could only read about in the Carnegie Library after school. In between sweeping out his shop, going to school, shadowing Dr. Agnelli at his clinic, and hanging out with my friends Angelo and Tomas—and sometimes Sal—I dreamed of foreign and exotic places.
I was Lawrence of Arabia, Marco Polo, Charles Lindbergh, and Admiral Byrd rolled into one.
Ta pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
Just call me Berto Mitty.
Sometimes we would talk after visiting the Old Guys at Mr. Ruddy’s. The tales they spun about “Gay Paree” and the battlefields of Europe put stars in our eyes.
It was Sal (Wasn’t it always?) who suggested we go down to the railroad tracks. They were a bit of a walk, even farther than the rich people’s neighborhood. We lived on the perimeter of a transportation hub. New York City was to the northeast, and Elizabethtown Port was to the south. Both were far-away places. But the railroads … ah, they lay right before us.
What boychik could resist the sounds and smells of the great metal beasts, the whistles and the clickety-clacks, as they pulled their burdens in and out of the vast rail yard just outside of Newark? What boy would not love the mixture of diesel oil, soot, and ozone, as both diesel-electric and coal-burning engines whooshed or roared past our perches along the edge of the gravel berm carrying the tracks to their respective terminals?
Whenever we were willing to walk the distance to reach the rails, we would sprawl out and watch. Freight trains, some a hundred-cars long, would roll over the multiple tracks leading in and out of the nearby industrial complexes that had sprouted up because of the war. Their giant, double locomotives let out their Doppler-shifting, banshee calls of greeting and warning as they passed each other. We would laugh and yell back “whoo-whooo!”
Sometimes an engineer, his arm hanging out the side window, would see us lying there. He’d wave and pull the cord of his whistle in greeting: “Awhooh, Awhooh.”
In the other direction, behemoth, sleek diesel-electrics with insignias on them—Indian Chief, City of St. Louis, and others—pulled maroon coach cars filled with people reading newspapers or just staring out the window. Stainless steel and duralumin Pullman sleepers and dining cars, from places like Florida and Boston and points west, rumbled past, as each engine’s single, giant, electric eye cast its light beam, even during the day, and the passenger trains slowed to enter the Newark terminal.
What could be more exciting and romantic for a ten-year-old boy than the snuffling of the wheels and the hissing of multiple air brakes?
“Hey, looka that guy! He just got pushed outta that freight car.”
Angelo loved watching the freight trains more than the passenger liners.
Tomas yawned.
“Probably a ‘bo.”
Sal noogied Angelo’s head.
“What’s a ‘bo?”
“He means hobo, Sal.”
I was showing off my newly acquired book knowledge. I had spent a good part of the previous Saturday in the library. The black-and-white images of men during the Great Depression were still fresh in my mind—thousands of the economically displaced seeking their fortunes by riding the rails on the cheap, hitching aboard freight cars going anywhere but where they had been.
I still think of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. We stared at the patchwork man rolling down the steep track edge. He came to an abrupt stop in a stand of cat-o’-nine tails and sumac bushes and let out a groan. A cloth bag hurled out of the slowly moving freight car landed near us.
We were boys, and all boys, to put it bluntly, who grew up during that time thought nothing of walking at night and talking to strangers and playing rough-and-tumble games, all without some do-gooder yelling at your parents for being irresponsible or calling in the social workers.
Tomas, our Mercury, ran to the bag and picked it up. Angelo the trickster grinned and ran after him. He wanted to see what was inside the cloth pouch. I was startled when Sal yelled, “Leave it be! It belongs to the old man.”
He ran toward the others. I followed.
“Come on, he might be hurt.”
Sal took the bag from Tomas and approached the sprawled figure on the ground. We could hear his low moans as he twisted around before grunting and sitting up.
“You need help, Mister?”
“My bindle, where’s my bindle. You kids got my bindle?”
Sal held out the bag, and the guy snatched it from his hand without a word. He untied the top string, rummaged inside, seemed satisfied that nothing was missing, and glared at us.
“You gonna help me up or not?”
We were taken aback. He saw our expressions, slapped his right knee, and started to laugh.
“Sorry gents, I forget my manners. Please, help me up. Okay?”
Sal stepped forward and held out his hands, and we followed suit. It took the three of us to get him to his feet, and even then he was a bit unsteady.
We could smell that hallmark combination of unwashed body, sweat, booze, and just plain rancidness. The guy’s breath exuded stale tobacco and bad teeth. His face bore at least a week’s worth of unshaved beard stubble and a mixture of old and fairly recent scars. The hands that we held hadn’t seen soap or nail cutting for who knows how long.
But he laughed, as he tried to focus on all three of us at once. I noticed that one eye, his left, deviated out to the side. He patted the dust off his old, coarse, wool black trousers with button fly and then snapped his suspenders in place. The gray broadcloth coat he wore probably had been new sometime before World War I.
Tomas hesitantly asked, “Are you a ‘bo, mista?”
Stretching to his full height—maybe five feet, nine inches—the man looked down at us and declared, “I am Mordecai Jones, late of Nova Scotia, Montreal, and points north. You may call me ‘Professor.’”
“Yeah, right, you’re a ‘bo.”
Angelo was not usually that blunt.
“Gentlemen, what are your names?”
We all hesitated then Sal spoke up.
“I’m Salvatore. These guys here are Angelo, Tomas and Berto.”
“Ah, you’re all paisan, right?”
That we understood. We nodded.
“Where do you live?”
We told him and he shook his head in disappointment—no easy pickings in our fun-filled little neighborhood. Then Tomas said, “But there are some nice places where you could get stuff.”
He squinted at us and that left blue eye tried its best to accompany its brother.
“Have you seen anything like this in those ‘nice places’?”
He picked up a small stone from the track berm and squatted down. Then he began to scratch what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics in the hard dirt.
They were symbols: ///, ##, and pictures that looked like a cat and a top hat with a triangle.
We all shook our heads at first, but then Angelo said, “Wait, I think I saw the cat in front of convent where the nuns live.
Mordecai Jones broke out in a grin, and we could see those stubs of rotten teeth jutting out.
“Whadda those mean, mista?”
Tomas was curious.
“They’re ‘bo signs, kid.”
He turned to me then looked at Sal.
“Your friend doesn’t say much, does he?”
“Be thankful, Mr. Jones. Normally he doesn’t shut up.”
It was true. I hadn’t said anything. Watching Mordecai Jones, my wanderlust seemed to evaporate. My dream bubble had burst, and I did what I normally did when disappointment hit: I withdrew into silence. It wasn’t until I was older, and my male hormones disrupted my sanity, that I was able to direct my anger and grief outward verbally. It didn’t help fully, though, and even now I revert to the silence that speaks volumes.
“Watcha gonna do tonight, mista?”
Tomas was really on a roll.
“Yeah, you really need a bath, mister. You smell.”
Angie wasn’t holding back, either.
“Young man, get it right. I stink, you smell it. There’s a difference.”
We all nodded, and then I realized why he called himself “the professor.”
“See that big tower over there with the long pipe hanging down?”
We looked up at the giant watering can. Behind it in the distance I could see the giant, neon, REDI-KILOWATT sign of Con Edison, and the Zipper Man sign.
“That’s a water silo for the steam locomotives. I’ll get my bath tonight when it’s dark. Don’t want to scare the ladies, do we, gents?”
When the others laughed, Mordecai noted my failure to join in.
Berto's World_Stories Page 4