The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  “You ain’t got no right to hit my daughter.”

  “I DID NOT HIT YOUR DAUGHTER!” Mrs. Graux blurted out. At that, the class looked at one another knowingly but silently.

  “Don’t gimme that, you did, too,” said Lauren’s father. “Look at that mark on her face.”

  “What are you talking about? She’s always had that mark on her face.” Lauren began to cry. The teacher’s scowl turned into a calm smile, and she addressed the class: “Boys and girls,” she said. She always used “boys and girls” on those rare occasions when she was in a kindly mood. “Boys and girls, I didn’t hit anyone, did I?” There was total silence as she panned the room. “Did any of you see me hit Lauren?” As the nonresponse continued, Lauren looked up from her desk and swept the class with her eyes. As she looked at each student, he or she looked away, embarrassed and frightened. One could see the hurt and fury in her face as she realized how alone she was. The father looked at the children, too confused to be contemptuous of us.

  “Once again, I say, did I hit Lauren?” No one stirred. A broad, misanthropic smile crossed Mrs. Graux’s slanted face. She was in complete control, as usual.

  I had assumed that since everyone in the class had witnessed the assault, someone would speak up and tell the truth. I was fervently hoping, however, that it wouldn’t have to be me. It is difficult for me to recall what I was thinking in the crucial moments before I spoke. In my memory, it was as if I had decided to give up my own life for a principle, like diving on a grenade to save others; essentially, a heroic suicide. But this was not a movie. I raised my hand as if in a dream and said very quietly in a monotone: “Mrs. Graux, I saw you hit Lauren.”

  There was an audible gasp from the company assembled. Mrs. Graux’s face contorted in a way I had never seen, and her stare could have melted the glass in her old-lady spectacles. She walked ominously toward me, and I began to shake, thinking she would surely strike me. Her voice was hushed, with a venomous quality that more than compensated for its lack of volume. “What . . . did . . . you . . . say?” she growled, almost sotto voce.

  My reply seemed to take forever in coming, and I couldn’t look at her. “I . . . saw Lauren hit you . . . I mean . . . I saw you hit Lauren, Mrs. Graux.”

  She was bending over me as I sat. My lips were trembling, and tears began streaming down my cheeks. Her voice ascended gradually in volume to a piercing scream, like a Greek chorus. “Robert Klein. How dare you ACCUSE ME! YOU ARE A LIAR!”

  “No, Mrs. Graux, I’m not lying. Maybe you didn’t mean to—”

  “GET OUT OF THIS ROOM, YOU LIAR! GET OUT INTO THE HALL UNTIL I TELL YOU TO COME BACK, YOU LIAR!”

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was bawl in front of the class, but despite my best effort to hold it in, the dam broke, and I began to cry. As I walked, head bowed, toward the door, my eyes confirmed what I feared most of all: I had wet my pants. Lauren’s father took her hand and led her, sobbing, out of the room just behind me. The teacher slammed the door, the sound echoing in the cavernous hall like thunder and retribution.

  Out in the hall, Lauren’s father offered me a filthy handkerchief to wipe away the torrents of tears. His breath reeked of the liquid courage he had consumed before coming to the school, and his speech at this point was slurring badly. “Youse . . . youse all righ—okay, kid?” he said. I could not speak, stuttering between intakes of breath, the way children do when they are crying hysterically. “You’re a brave boy, kid,” he said, and I could see that he was shaken and trembling, like we were. Mrs. Graux could scare grown-ups, too. Lauren looked at me, standing humiliated in the hall. She put her arms around me and, to my surprise, hugged me without saying a word. I had never seen her show such affection before. She was not the tough kid I had known but a little girl in terrible distress who had received the support of two ineffectual people—her tipsy father and a nine-year-old boy—and she was grateful. Perhaps it was a small respite from her pain. She touched my cheek with her hand and said almost imperceptibly, “Thank you.”

  As I stood against the wall wilting, I watched Lauren and her father, his arm around her shoulder as he gently wiped away her tears with his handkerchief. Then they walked down the hall. He may have been drunk, and he may not have been an award-winning father, but he loved his child just as my daddy did. This day he had been as good and protective a parent as any parent ever was. What a woeful silhouette they made against the bright sunlight coming through the window at the end of the hall. It was as if they were walking into a better tomorrow, but I knew that Lauren was going home to the same troubled environment. Yet wasn’t it all a matter of perspective? Her parents couldn’t afford summer camp or a new car, but did they love their children any less? Were they any less deserving of compassion and fair play?

  The three remaining months of the term were almost unbearable. Mrs. Graux never spoke to me again or called on me in class. To her, I was a nonperson, which was almost worse than the occasional lethal stare. Her anger, though, wasn’t reflected in my grades, which were all excellent. I even got an S (satisfactory) in conduct on my final report card. The only blot on my official record was an N.I. (needs improvement) in the category called “works and plays well with others,” which was untrue but tolerable. It was Mrs. Graux who had not worked and played well with others. It was Mrs. Graux who had lied. Thankfully, my schoolmates did not share her disdain, and after a few days, our relationship was normal again.

  Most of the children were a little nicer to Lauren. At first she shunned their modest advances, but after a while, she was participating in the school-yard games and the general give-and-take with the others, the need to be liked and to belong being what it is. Mrs. Graux, though she seldom spoke to Lauren, treated her as if nothing had happened. The incident was never mentioned again. I felt no sense of having been heroic; I received no congratulations, even from Lauren, though I knew she was grateful. I guess in the end, everyone had eyes and ears and a conscience and knew what I had done and they had not.

  I never told my parents or anyone else about the affair for over twenty years. The story came out of me casually when I was thirty, on a shrink’s couch one day when I was particularly down on myself, and it startled me with its clarity. It was incomprehensible to my shrink that I had forgotten the story and did not see its importance. “Don’t you understand?” she said in her slightly Viennese accent. “You did the right thing and the noble thing. You risked much as a nine-year-old, for principles like truth and justice.” I conceded that maybe I had, but what of it? So many years later, that explanation of the events seemed pompous to me. Leave it to me to have repressed the memory of an altruistic deed, guilty, neurotic bastard that I am.

  Chapter Three

  The TeenTones

  The Bronx block I grew up on, Decatur Avenue between 211th Street and Gun Hill Road, was a steep hill worthy of San Francisco, so the ten or so snowfalls each winter were fervently anticipated, the hill being a wonderful sled run. I learned to play softball, curb ball, two-hand touch football, and stickball on an uphill incline, in the street and the vacant lots on what I reckon to be a five-degree angle.

  On the northern, 211th Street side lay the southern boundary of Woodlawn Cemetery, the eternal home of many of the famous and accomplished, like Fiorello La Guardia and Bat Masterson, and later, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. The surface of the cemetery was fifteen feet above the street, separated from it by a concrete wall adorned with stickball boxes.

  A stickball box was a rectangle approximately twenty inches across and thirty inches high, drawn with chalk or tar on the wall. The pitcher aimed the Spaulding rubber ball, called a Spaldeen, at the box, and this determined balls and strikes. The batter tried to hit the ball as far and hard as he could, its distance determining whether it was a single, double, triple, or home run. There were many such homemade boxes on the walls of the handball courts of public schools and parks. Our home field, however, was the cemetery wall. There was some graffiti on the bei
ge concrete, most of it of an ethnic character, as in “Scotch,” “Irish,” and a delicately written “Yea Jews.” There were some messages of a profane nature, but they were lame and stupid, like “Mary blows” or “Fuck you,” and were quickly painted over by diligent citizens.

  Political graffiti was rare, given the fifties-bred monolithic attitudes about world affairs. No one was against the Korean War, and of course Communists were our enemy, though a few brave left-wingers managed to write a fair amount of “Free the Rosenbergs” here and there around the neighborhood during the saga of the trial and subsequent execution. People put up hundreds of posters on the lampposts and in storefronts around Election Day, but these could hardly be called graffiti. They touted the candidates, most of whom were Democrats, while the pictures of the hopeless Republican candidates suffered the humiliation of penciled-in mustaches and blackened teeth.

  The southern, Gun Hill Road border of my block was a busy east-west thoroughfare of traffic and stores, and also a pronounced hill, appropriate to its name. I have seen places in Michigan and Iowa that call themselves “hill,” but they are optimistically or ludicrously named. Mine were real hills, up and down which children ran and played, and old people huffed and puffed.

  The area is purportedly steeped in Revolutionary War history, George Washington allegedly having visited the nearby Van Cortlandt Mansion several times: a questionable assumption. It is true that the New York City records were hidden in that house after the British captured the town, and that colonial troops evacuated as far north as Morrisania and Kingsbridge in the Bronx, with Washington using the Morrisania Mansion as a temporary headquarters. The major battle closest to my neighborhood was fought about six miles to the southwest of Decatur Avenue and Gun Hill Road, at a place called Washington Heights, in the northern part of Manhattan Island. It was one of the biggest disasters of the Revolutionary War, and it caused Washington to retreat across the river to New Jersey. First in war, first in peace, and first to flee to the suburbs (though he returned to the city later). After the war, President George Washington, his wife, and the Custis step-grandchildren liked to take daylong carriage rides from lower Manhattan, across the Harlem River, all the way north to Kingsbridge and back again. Kingsbridge is about two miles from my home, so that’s about as close as the Father of Our Country came to Gun Hill Road.

  Some of our streets were named after heroes of the War of 1812, which was fought on the high seas and hundreds of miles to the south, from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. Other streets were named after Civil War generals. Perpendicular to streets named Hull, Decatur, Perry, and Bainbridge, the small shops on Gun Hill Road reflected the needs of the residents on the smallest of scales, in an era that could not have imagined the Home Depot. Within a four-block perimeter, there were groceries and butcher shops, dry cleaners, hardware stores, and appetizing stores, which was the name given to smoked-fish-and-pickle emporiums whose tangy smell caused us to salivate like the proverbial Pavlovian dog. The pickles and sauerkraut were stored in huge barrels, much the way they had been delivered for two hundred years. The countermen could carve smoked salmon and marinated herring with the skill of surgeons, a skill that was passed on by the generations. We would buy a nickel’s worth of sauerkraut in a paper bag for a snack, as naturally as a kid would get a hamburger at McDonald’s today. There were shoemakers, pharmacies, barbershops, delicatessens, small dress shops, and candy stores. The candy stores had five-stool soda fountains where one could leisurely sip an egg cream, as well as purchase newspapers, magazines, and school supplies. They were also favored hangouts and places to exchange gossip. All of these stores were within walking distance of one’s home, generating a steady stream of pedestrians with reusable cloth shopping bags or carts, gathering the necessities of life.

  There was a most personal aspect to this. When you’ve known all of the merchants for twenty years, when the same Italian immigrant has resoled your shoes all your life, and the barber has cut your hair since you had to sit on two phone books, there is a comfortable, familiar sense of order and loyalty. The ownership of these businesses hardly ever changed.

  Most central of all the shops was the bakery, since fresh-baked bread purchased daily was the order of the day, the staff of life being far from a cliché to us. The Jews preferred the coarser rye breads, while the gentiles liked the white, though everybody loved the pastries and ordered birthday cakes, all of which were baked on the premises. There was a palpable European-village feel to the neighborhood that wasn’t happenstance, the majority of the residents being first-generation Americans and European immigrants. It was largely a Jewish population, particularly to the north of Gun Hill Road, with a sizable minority of Irish and Italians, especially to the south. Two parishes, Saint Ann’s and Saint Brendan’s, had parochial schools whose students wore uniforms. Many of the parochial school boys still wore knickers, a remnant of early-twentieth-century America, while the girls wore modest blue dresses called gamps.

  Gun Hill Road was a noisy street of cobblestones, built as in a previous century, a technique no doubt borrowed from Europe. Where horses once clopped and gripped, automobiles now rattled and rumbled with the sound of tires on bumpy cobble, and the Third Avenue El train screeched as it cautiously made its way around the sharp Webster Avenue turn. The Number 15 Gun Hill bus had a nice diesel roar as it tugged up the hill westward, and when a large truck made its way up Decatur in low gear, the windows shook and the vibrations bounced off the four buildings, creating a canyon of booming noise. Then, of course, there were the horn blowers whose cars were blocked in by a double-parker. These were the most conspicuous sounds from outside, but there was always the background din: of human voices and children playing and the half-mile-distant White Plains Road train going fast into the Gun Hill station and the frequent zoom and percussive clatter and occasional whistle of the New York Central trains speeding through the tiny Williamsbridge station, north to Chatham and south to Grand Central, the tracks not two hundred yards from my sixth-floor window on the world.

  I describe some of these sounds, the trains, for instance, as a blind man might, because I couldn’t see them from my window, and yet they were an important part of the pastiche of my childhood. Somehow the screech of the El on the turn stands out: For some reason, I associate it with feeling depressed. Late at night, the cacophony would tone down to an occasional barking dog, but it never disappeared completely, the busy Bronx being what it was.

  Decatur Avenue was my world until kindergarten, at which time I walked the three blocks west to Kings College Place and Public School 94. Parents had not the slightest compunction about sending their young children off to school without supervision; the big kids presumably kept an eye on the little kids. The terms “little kids” and “big kids” were important designations in the neighborhood, which defined who you and your friends were. Exactly at what age a little kid became a big kid was unclear, but you could tell one from the other—perhaps junior high school was a dividing line. The standard safety instructions for children were about looking both ways before crossing the street, being wary of strangers and not taking candy from them, and something about watching out for perverts. Some kid from the neighborhood had seen a man on Hull Avenue who opened his raincoat, flashed his genitals, and ran. This was the only crime I remember hearing about in our safe, cozy neighborhood.

  The route to and from P.S. 94 was parallel to Woodlawn Cemetery, which seemed to elicit some curiosity among the children. It was not unusual for us to stop and watch a funeral near the black steel picket fence where it became level with the street. The parklike setting and the mountains of flowers were beautiful and fascinating. Strangely, the mourning of the participants seemed to escape our notice. Whether this was the blithe denial of children is not clear to me; but it was so. It was not until the fifth grade, at the age of nine, that I began connecting the concept of death with the ubiquitous cemetery looming a few feet from my home, school, and play area.

  It was
a vertical existence, living in 3525 Decatur Avenue, our art deco apartment building that housed eighty-six families. I lived on the top floor, Apartment 6F, with a front view looking down on the street: definitely a preferred location, since the rear apartments faced the building twenty feet to the west. There was a good deal of looking out the window for us front dwellers, to see what was happening on the block and to keep an eye on the children playing in the street below. When the ice-cream man came jingling on Decatur Avenue, all the kids looked up toward their apartment windows and hollered, “Ma!” at the top of their lungs. Each mother knew her own child’s cry, like the millions of birds on the Galapagos Islands know the cry of their chicks. The mothers would throw down ten cents from heights of seventy feet, which in retrospect was dangerous. My safety-conscious mother would wrap the coin in a paper bag and toss it aerodynamically, gracefully, but most important, harmlessly, into my arms. What a sweet and thoughtful mama. The parents who were mad at their kids would toss the dime right into the kid’s head with a force of four G’s on it, as when David hit Goliath between the eyes.

  For us apartment dwellers, life was an up-and-down affair. When I went out to play, I did not tell my mother that I was going out, but rather that I was going down. It was routine discourse on the street: “Are you going up now?” “No, I just came down.” “Oh. I came down a long time ago. I’m going up now. Call me when you go up.” I would take the elevator up, but I preferred the wide staircases for my trips down, as most of the kids did—descending in rapid, noisy, rhythmic clumps, jumping from the last four steps, consummately childlike. Each landing was well lit by the sunlight through the ample windows, and the big stucco walls of the hall were perfect for a few tosses with the ever present rubber ball carried in the pocket of my dungarees—my play pants, changed into from my school pants.