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 beige 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.

The halls smelled of pies baking in the afternoon and boiled chicken and broiling lamb chops in the evening, all of it mixed with the scents of hundreds of people. I could always smell women’s perfumes, which lingered particularly in the elevator. The grown-ups were pure elevator types, going down in them as well as up, never taking the stairs. It became my dream to live in a place someday where I could say I was going out instead of going down, complete with a backyard and trees and no dog shit on the ground.

Until they were built on later, for most of my childhood there were three hilly vacant lots on the block. The two at the north end of the block, closest to the cemetery, were our unofficial playgrounds. On the west, relatively level side, we played softball, while the east lot was used for cowboys and Indians and soldier games. We were brought up in the glory of World War II and the concomitant Hollywood movies about it, so that all of us liked to play soldier. I saw Halls of Montezuma and Sands of Iwo Jima three times and could not hold back tears at the end. A particular favorite was called Who Dies Best? In this war game, the contest was about who could die the most authentic death after being shot. The shooter would announce the caliber and type of weapon, and the victim would charge the foxhole, get shot, grab his stomach, and fall as spectacularly as possible. We made not the slightest connection between our game and the reality of war and combat, not seeing the irony of being exuberant in a sensational death—albeit a painless one—as the movies and newsreels had always sanitized the carnage.

The steep bumpy terrain of the northeast lot provided a thrilling, if brief, sled run in the winter and was hyperbolically called Dead Man’s Hill. In season, there were major weekend softball games among the biggest kids on the block, some of whom were sixteen and seventeen, and it was a great rite of passage for a thirteen-year-old to finally be allowed to play. Nobody paid attention to the boulder behind first base in fair territory, called the Big Fat Rock, which was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and upon which we played King of the Mountain.

All of the lots were repositories of castaway junk, broken glass, the occasional dead rat, and the fecal matter of dozens of local dogs in a time long before scooper laws. It was standard procedure to check one’s shoes constantly, especially before entering the house, as we were forever stepping in it. My mother would have me bend my leg back at the knee so she could inspect the soles of my shoes, like a blacksmith examining a hoof. Removing the foul stuff in the street could be difficult. It required ingenuity and improvisation, using whatever tools we could find in the lots, like newspaper and small pieces of wood. If all else failed, the metal edge of the curb was the last resort.

The street itself—called the gutter as opposed to the sidewalk—was a major playground, and there were games for all seasons. Fungo stickball, in which the batter threw the Spaldeen up and hit it without a pitcher, was a staple. So were curb ball and association football, which could be played with as few as two boys on a side. Parked cars were reference points for someone going out for a pass, as in: “Go to the Buick, fake, and then I’ll hit you at the Plymouth.” Cars coming up and down the street were a bother, but someone would yell “Car!” and play would suspend until it safely passed. It was strictly against the unwritten rules to yell “Car!” if none was there, and no one ever did.

We also played with the Spaldeen on the sidewalk. Box baseball was popular, which used the lines between the four-foot squares of concrete as boundaries, placing the players about sixteen feet apart, and the boy who was pitching would put a spin on the ball so that it bounced off the sidewalk oddly, making it more difficult to hit with the opponent’s open palm. We also flipped baseball cards from the curb to the wall of the building; the nearest card to the wall won, and the winner took the loser’s cards. Blackjack and poker became popular, with baseball cards as the street currency that was valuable indeed, especially the rare ones, though none of us ever thought of the cards as a future investment. When they outgrew them, the big kids would have a “hot scramble,” in which they would throw hundreds of cards out the window like a ticker-tape parade, and forty little kids would scramble to collect them in the street below, like they were nuggets of gold.

We played skully, in which we struck bottle caps weighted with wax, by releasing the middle finger from under the thumb, which made them slide across the sidewalk. Marbles were strangely out of vogue on Decatur Avenue at that time. The girls jumped rope and played jacks on the sidewalk. They played with the Spaldeen as well, but instead of stickball and curb ball, they would bounce the thing while reciting old rhymes: “A, my name is Alice, and my sister’s name is Alicia, and we come from Albany.” On every word with the letter A, they would cross a leg over the ball and then go to the next letter of the alphabet, and so on: a more literate approach to game playing. Potsy was another favorite of the girls, and the only game that girls and boys sometimes played together, though as a boy got older, he did not especially want to be seen playing potsy. I don’t remember the rules of potsy, but it involved throwing your keys and hopping.

One September day, we were playing stickball in the asphalt gutter, and a small black truck arrived at the building across the street from mine. It said MORTUARY DIVISION on the two doors in the back, and a police car accompanied it. Word quickly spread that they were there to remove a dead body from the building, and the curious, including us, formed a crowd around the vehicle. Dozens of heads popped out of windows to see what was going on, as they always did when an ambulance, fire truck, or police car made an appearance on the street, or a loud verbal ruckus ensued between two people after the same parking space. The attendants came out of the building carrying the body in a leathery black bag, placed it in the truck, and drove off to the morgue.

My friends and I did not resume our game. Instead, we sat down on the curb and began discussing what we had just seen; about what happens to a dead body; about heaven and hell; and the most difficult concept of all—finality. That night was the first of many that I thought and dreamed, indeed obsessed, about death. There were two aspects to my obsession: One was the fear that my mother or father would die; and the second was my contemplation of the state of death itself, what it would be like to die and be buried. The burial part was particularly distressing to my claustrophobic nature, fueled no doubt by my reading Tales from the Crypt comic books at my aunt Laura’s candy store on Tremont Avenue. While my father chatted with my aunt at the counter, I would sit in a musty booth at the back and absorb tales of people buried alive who came out of the grave dead, dripping rotting flesh, and exacted revenge. There was a horrible odor in the back of the candy store of must and decay, caused by decomposing sugar syrup and the leftover soda in the returnable bottles. I associated the foul smell with graves and the stench of decaying bodies that I could almost sense leaping off the page of the brilliant but ghastly comic-book illustrations.

I worried constantly about my father’s health, which as a matter of fact was excellent. When he took a nap, I would make it a point to see that he wasn’t dead, checking his chest for motion to prove he was alive. If the breathing seemed imperceptible, I would intentionally make a loud noise to evoke from him a groan or a movement of his body to indicate that my greatest fear had not been realized. For some reason, though I loved her as much, I did not have the same concern about the sudden death of my mother. I would hear in school that someone’s father had died—usually of a heart attack—much more often than I would hear the news of a mother’s death. The mothers seemed more frequently to die a lingering death from cancer.

These questions of life vis-à-vis death vexed me as a child. I did not want to be buried in some lonely, distantly located cemetery that no one would visit, especially since my ashes could be conveniently located in the living room. And how could I know or care if anybody was visiting? I’d be dead, right? As a small child, I had visited my grandparents’ graves once in the old Mount Hebron Cemetery, near the World’s Fair grounds. Unlike Woodlawn, there was row upon row of graves crowded together with tall headstones, which gave the site a close, claustrophobic feel in addition to its significance as a place of death. I was especially haunted by the graves of children who had died forty years earlier: Were they still children? Many of these headstones contained metallic photographs of the children, which was a custom of the day. Some were about my age and buried six feet beneath the cold ground. I had several bad dreams after the cemetery visit, so my parents avoided taking me again, which was fine with me. In contemplating cremation, however, Tales from the Crypt once again crept into my thought process, and burning alive is only slightly less appalling than buried alive—well, not alive, exactly, because you’re dead, and you’re not supposed to feel anything. Maybe I could hedge my bet and get cremated in a fireproof suit.

*  *  *

After seven years at P.S. 94, it was time to move on to junior high school, which stretched my parameters—in truth, my world—eight blocks south and west to Mosholu Parkway. Once again I walked to school. I never took a school bus in my life. There I encountered the social culture of my fellow teenagers. In the evenings (excluding the dead of winter), a hundred kids or more would gather on the Mosholu Parkway fence, across the street from the school.

It was in junior high school that I first encountered male teachers and different teachers in different classrooms for various subjects, which was called “departmental” and seemed so grown up. The change of periods was a refreshing departure from the humdrum of one classroom and one teacher from nine to three.

It was also at this time that I made some friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Hanging out frequently on the parkway fence had to wait until high school, however, as my parents kept a tight rein on my weekday evenings. DeWitt Clinton High School was an all-boys institution that 90 percent of the neighborhood boys attended. It had a sort of macho tradition and a long and venerable list of distinguished graduates, such as Burt Lancaster, James Baldwin, Paddy Chayevsky, and Neil Simon. It also had a police car permanently parked near the front entrance, for those students who were less distinguished. When I was a little boy, I could not help but notice the distinctive red-and-black Clinton jackets worn by the big kids, as if they belonged to some mystical fraternity. The walk to DeWitt Clinton was twelve blocks or approximately one half mile, but the center of my social life became Mosholu Parkway, specifically, the three-foot-high steel piping that constituted the fence where the guys and chicks would gather. Decatur Avenue became just a place to sleep.

The parkway was an exciting experience, given the energy and vitality of its inhabitants, synergized by their sheer numbers. Most were good kids and attentive students, with a sprinkling of “rocks,” who in a later era were referred to as “greasers.” That type was portrayed in a cartoon way on television as Fonzie from Happy Days, which was created by Garry Marshall, who hung out on the parkway several years before I did. His sister Penny was more my contemporary, and I held hands with her cute gum-cracking redheaded friend Margie Pace. A stylish young fellow named Ralph Lifschitz would park his little British automobile, a Morgan, amid the admiring kids. In a few years, he would metamorphose, like a caterpillar into a butterfly, as Ralph Lauren. Interestingly, Calvin Klein lived a few buildings away, but I cannot recall him hanging out on the parkway.

I had, for the first time, achieved a kind of social status. I was funny; clowning was my old standby, my longtime ticket out of anonymity—and fights. I had a new passion: singing in a rock-and-roll vocal quartet called the TeenTones. Doo-wop vocals were all the rage, and our harmony was good for amateurs, bearing in mind that amateurs could quickly become recording artists in the fledgling rock-and-roll business of the mid-fifties, or so we hoped. Our group began attracting the attention of the kids on the parkway; people listened, clapped, and showed appreciation. When the weather was inclement, we would sing inside and vibrate the concrete halls of the junior high school, which became a recreation center in the evening. At DeWitt Clinton, the rehearsal room of choice was the men’s room, with its marvelous echoes and unfortunate bouquet. When we harmonized in the men’s room, it sounded like we were singing in a recording studio, albeit an unsavory one. It was definitely our best sound. Oddly, whenever we harmonized anywhere else, it sounded like we were singing in a men’s room.

I was a TeenTone to the core. From the moment my gaze fell in the morning on the beige ceiling of the family living room where I slept on a convertible bed, to the nighttime parallel-line shadows of the streetlights coming through the venetian blinds upon which I plotted my future before sleep, I thought and breathed TeenTones. You could say the group was my obsession, my hope, my ambition. School was just a six-hour interruption of the life of a TeenTone. Bellowing three- and four-part harmonies freed me. They call it doo-wop now, but I don’t recall that expression used in the fifties, when groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Heartbeats, and the Cadillacs were hitting the charts. We idolized Frankie Lymon and his group particularly, because they were young high school kids like us.

In any event, the TeenTones were not in that elite group just yet, our performances largely confined to park fences and school toilets, yet people told us we were good, and we believed them, and it fueled us to rehearse the hit tunes and make up new ones. We were a neighborhood hit, and I began to notice the rapt and admiring attention of postpubescent girls who had paid little attention to me before. Life was looking up for the TeenTones, and now there was talk of auditioning for an appearance on the Original Amateur Hour, a creaking but nonetheless network television program on ABC. Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour was outdated even by nineteen-fifties standards, but TeenTones couldn’t be choosers, and the prospect thrilled us and gave us ever more incentive to improve.

All of this heady stuff was swirling in my mind one chilly November evening as I walked the eight blocks or so to rehearsal. I was wearing my Clinton jacket, which, though very much in vogue, was not warm enough to match the cold and brisk wind of a Bronx winter. Local mothers and fathers had always dressed their little boys up for the season—“You don’t want to catch cold”—with mittens, sweaters, scarves and bulky, unstylish coats. The worst of it was that we were forced to wear hats with ear laps—there was nothing shmuckier or less cool than ear laps. For a big kid, it was a macho sign to one’s peers to brave the cold with less, not more: no jackets below the waist, no hat.

I was headed for the parkway. The TeenTones would be practicing at the junior high school, which was open three nights a week for basketball, Ping-Pong, and knock hockey. Our favorite rehearsal venue was the first-floor boys’ toilet; but if the odor and traffic became unmanageable and interfered with our artistry, the echo of the concrete stairwells would do nicely. Anyway, we had discovered that the girls couldn’t watch us if we sang in the boys’ room. We made a perfect acoustical accompaniment to the bouncing of basketballs and the cracking of knock-hockey pucks, and small groups of kids gathered to listen.

I walked up the hill with an icy wind in my face and my hands in my jacket pockets, toward Reservoir Oval, which was a park and athletic field converted from the old Williamsbridge Reservoir in one of those wonderful Depression-era construction projects designed to create work. And beautiful work it was, the kind of workmanship one would seldom see today, featuring a carved stone main building and walkways of octagonal tiles. The Oval was about a mile in circumference, and though it had a decorative five-foot-high fence (pickets of black painted steel with a horizontal beam at the top and bottom), one could enter at several ornate stone entrances placed around it. In a time-saving pinch, the fence could be climbed, as its function was more aesthetic than utilitarian. My route would take me about one quarter of the way around the Oval before I had to proceed west several more blocks to Mosholu Parkway and the school. The Oval had an upper level inside the fence, which ran next to the circular street (called Reservoir Oval Avenue), forming two large concentric circles or, more properly, ovals. I had the option of walking around the top level or on the sidewalk across the street: I had gone both ways many times on the way to school, but I usually preferred the outside-street route in the evening.

Inside the park, one could descend the thirty steps to the lower level, where there was a football field, a running track, tennis courts, and several playground areas containing swings, seesaws, and monkey bars. This was not considered a wise thing to do after dark, as the lower level was said to be the gathering place for youths bent on lower pursuits. These guys were from east of the Oval and beyond, a different neighborhood altogether, and strangers to us. We had heard stories of kids who’d ventured down at the wrong time and had been harassed and beaten, and some had had money stolen. It was referred to as getting jumped. In the daytime, evidence of these strangers’ pleasure and malfeasance could be seen in the bushes: beer bottles, cigarette butts, and discarded condoms.

When I got to the top of the hill near the entrance to the Oval, I saw two old men in the dim light of the lampposts. They had just entered and were strolling around the upper level of the park, conversing with their hands behind their backs. There was no one else in sight. I could see the slight shine from their satin yarmulkes, which told me that they were fresh from evening services at the Gun Hill Jewish Center, one hundred yards to the left. As this was a Wednesday night, the turnout would be sparse, indicating that these old gentlemen were pious indeed. Perhaps the sight of them provided a sort of comfort, as the presence of grown-ups usually did in dark and deserted places. So that night I chose the inside-park route. I undertook a brisk pace along the upper walk of the Oval. In short order, I was overtaking the two men, whose tempo was more leisurely, and as they heard my footsteps, each turned a little anxiously to see who was behind him. I suppose it amused me that they might consider me a threat, followed immediately by the empathetic desire to reassure them and let them know that I was just a good boy who meant no harm, on his way to a TeenTones rehearsal. I wanted to shout out, “Just passing! Not going to jump you!,” but I didn’t. I created a Boy Scout voice for a most cheery and innocent “Good evening,” and passed by them innocently, like a figure from a Norman Rockwell painting, humming the various harmony parts we would be rehearsing shortly. I had another few minutes of walking to do before I would exit, and the coast was clear.

It was then that I heard voices about two hundred feet behind me and to the right. It was certainly not the old men. These were the more vigorous, assertive voices of youth. As I turned, I could see, in the sparse light, three figures climbing the fence, and nimbly at that, into the park. There was a gleam off their bodies that became, on clearer view, the shining leather and silver accessories of motorcycle jackets, which were not usually the favored attire of honor students. After they had traversed the narrow grass section and hit the stone of the park walk, I could hear distinctly the definitive clack of motorcycle boots, which in the Bronx of that time (like the jackets) were a social statement, none of it having anything to do with motorcycles. They began walking in my direction purposefully. I could have bolted and outrun them to the park exit, given my lead; or jumped the fence and run down the hill. Shame overcame fear, and boyish pride took hold. I did not run, though I instantly changed my walking style to a more arrogant, tough gait, like someone not to be messed with. There was always hope—the hope that they had another engagement down in the belly of the Oval to drink beer, smoke, and get laid.

But their steady encroachment and the awful sound of six heavy boots on stone belied any innocent stroll in the park, and I began to feel like a dead duck whose continued humming was so much delusional bravado. I felt like a boy who had made a bad decision. I dared not look back, not wanting them to see me sneaking peeks, though a proverbial chill ran up my spine, and my pulse was revved to frightening heights; I was trembling. Clack, clump, clack, clump. They were close now, and I could hear their voices like hissing snakes, but I could not distinguish what they were saying. Then they were surrounding me, two in front and one behind, and would not let me pass. It was a surreal instant when the numb distance of a dream—seeing the scene from the outside, as if I weren’t in it—momentarily overcame fear. I tried to keep walking, but the two in front gave me a vicious push so that I almost fell. They were big, maybe sixteen-year-olds, and they stood with their feet planted a wise-guy length apart. In the paltry park light, I could not clearly see their facial features, but something in their hands was shiny. “What do you want?” I said.

There was silence for a few moments, as much silence as you could hear in the Bronx if you excluded traffic and fire engines and the screech of the elevated train and a million people. Where the fuck were the people now? To think that those distant sounds represented human beings, grown-ups with whom I could find sanctuary. But they were in the wrong place. Or, more accurately, I was. I thought of my mother: She could be looking out the window right now, five blocks away. Then the extraneous sounds faded out, and all I could hear was the quiet whoosh of the wind blowing through the barren branches, sweeping along a few leaves and twigs. It was as if there was no one else in the world but we four. Oh, for a beautiful green-and-white police car!

“Whaddaya want? I got a rehearsal,” I repeated, in my best Bronx street dialect. Who knows, maybe they were TeenTone fans, but they had to notice my shaking knees. “I gotta go, I’ll be late,” I said.

The tall one came right up to me, holding something in his hand, and pushed it against my stomach. “Shut up or you get this,” he said, like a cliché from an early James Cagney movie. I instinctively placed my hand on the object and explored it gently with my fingers like a sightless person. It was cylindrical and cold to the touch. This was no cliché. This was a homemade twenty-two-caliber firearm commonly called a zip gun: a device of wood and pipe, with rubber bands providing the tension for the hammer. It was pointed two inches from my gut, and the fucking moron holding it had his finger on the trigger. The newspapers were full of stories of boys killed by zip guns. The other two flashed switchblade knives that had sprung open with consecutive loud clicks. The light reflected not only off their leather apparel and weapons but off their shiny greaser hairdos as well, with the little spill hanging down over the forehead like Sal Mineo had.

These observations were made by me in the span of a second, a very long and anxious second. My body was in full flight-or-fight mode, though running was out of the question, the gun having skewed that equation. Fighting was a poor option as well, given the weapons and my appalling dearth of fighting prowess and, I guess, courage. I knew instinctively that I could not joke my way out of this, as I had with previous minor scrapes. The situation did not look good, and there was nothing for a boy to do, so without thinking (or rather, thinking a mile a minute), I pretended to faint.

I slid gently to the stone walk in a kind of pseudo swoon, being careful to avoid hitting my head. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Was it believable? “He fainted,” the tall one said. He sounded worried. “Holy shit,” said another one. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said the third, and he clicked his knife closed. After a few seconds of possumlike stillness, I opened my eyes and looked up and got a good view of the tall one. “McVay!” I blurted out. “Klein!” he said, just as surprised. It was a guy from my biology class: Ace McVay, six foot four, skinny as a rail, with a hideous complexion that looked like a relief map of the Himalayas. His real name was Percival, though it was generally considered that one called him that at significant risk. He had begun his high school career as an honor student but was now on the verge of flunking out, if he attended class at all. He was known as a tough guy at school, though I can’t remember much evidence to verify that fact. It was just the way he carried himself, the “I don’t give a shit” attitude, the boots and jacket, and a hell of a name—Ace McVay.

“Oh, fuck, he knows you. What the fuck are we gonna do now?” said the one who had closed his knife. Much to my dismay, he clicked it open again and came toward me with his weapon at the ready. “I’m gonna cut the motherfucker,” he said.

McVay extended his long arm and stopped the guy’s advance. The other guy with the knife said: “Ace, we gotta do something, he can identify us, he’ll talk.”

“Not here,” said McVay. “We’ll bring him down into the bushes and take care of him there.” With a gun pointed at me, I opted to stay on the ground and avoid any sudden movement that might send me six feet under (those thoughts again). I definitely thought at that moment that my life might end here. I was sorry I had not requested above ground burial, but I was fourteen and had not expected my demise so soon.

Suddenly, there was the faint sound of voices borne by the wind—it was the two old men. McVay stuck the pistol down the front of his pants. With any luck, maybe it would fire and blow his balls off, the bastard. He bent down and pulled me violently to my feet. The two old men approached, which seemed to unnerve these shitheads, who hid their knives and assumed a nonchalant pose. Thank God for grown-ups. But why did the two available ones have to be enfeebled and seventy-five?

They stopped briefly. “Everything all right?” one of them said in a European accent. McVay, whose back was toward them, put his hand on his gun and glared at me. “Everything’s fine,” I said. The men walked on. A thought shot through my mind that the old gentlemen knew exactly what was happening but were too afraid to intercede. Who could blame them? I hoped they would call the police.

“Shit, those fuckin’ old geezers saw us now. Too many witnesses, let’s bug outta here,” said the one who wanted to cut me.

“Bullshit. It’s fuckin’ dark, they couldn’t see us, the nosy fucks. But he knows me and that’s a problem,” said Ace McVay, who withdrew the gun from his pants and pushed it into my belly once again, harder than before. He made the most menacing face he could, a face I would remember for a long, long time. I thought this was it.

Then he said, “This never happened, you understand? You better keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. Now, get going and keep walking.”

This seemed like an excellent, not to say reasonable, idea. I acceded to it immediately, my prospects for a fifteenth birthday having improved considerably. I could hear the threesome grumbling behind me, then the clack-clump of their boots across the walk, followed by the crackling of the bushes that descended to the playground. I was in a kind of trancelike shock as I hurried away at a respectable medium pace: I did not run. But after a couple of minutes, the reality of my acute humiliation began to set in. The awful thought of having been violated, and my strategically sound but hardly courageous fainting shtick, commenced to haunt me and gnaw at my self-esteem. This feeling became a familiar one in the coming weeks, as omnipresent as the air I breathed: the air of abasement, of shame.

As I passed the old men yet again, they seemed concerned and looked me over. One of them said, “You all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I just fell.”

But I was not fine. I was furious and deflated and chagrined. I arrived at rehearsal with forced composure to find three thoroughly jolly TeenTones horsing around and laughing. Sure, nobody had just threatened to kill them. When I told them about my experience, I intentionally chose to underplay the intense emotion of the event (again, boyish pride) and emphasize the fortunate outcome: the result of the assailant being my classmate, and of course my fainting ruse, which I recounted humorously. The TeenTones found the story quite funny, and I even pretended to agree, though I could not yet, with the event so fresh in my mind, see much humor in it. I hid my disappointment at their lack of compassion and their failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the affair. Apparently, TeenTones are easily amused, though I had contributed to their attitude with my evasion of emotion.

After rehearsal, for which I had little enthusiasm, I took the longer but well lit and heavily traveled route of Gun Hill Road home. I thought of the future, and of the irony that the very thing that had saved me from physical harm—my acquaintance with my assailant—was also to be my curse. We were schoolmates. Despite the fact that Ace McVay’s attendance at DeWitt Clinton High School was becoming sporadic at best, I dreaded encountering him. It was not so much that I feared another physical confrontation, though I did; it was the mortification I dreaded most: the shame of a marked man. He and his goons had been witness to when I was demonstrably the weak lamb to his menacing lion, and he knew it. I fantasized many times about blowing his head off, about punching his ugly face so many times that he would bleed from every pimple. I almost bit my own lower lip just thinking about it. Now it was his smirking countenance on my living room ceiling morning and night, instead of my favorite images of the TeenTones and rock-and-roll stardom. In fact, my enthusiasm for the whole TeenTone enterprise diminished. I had trouble falling asleep, and previously innocuous noises set me on edge: I was not the boy I had been before the outrage.

I did not see him again until a week after the incident. There was McVay, between classes, walking in my direction in one of the long, crowded corridors of the huge building. When he spotted me, I saw an instantaneous change in his demeanor. He toughened his walk as he approached: more resolve, more intimidation, more of a clack from his boots. His steely gray eyes were focused on me, bespeaking the unmistakable message “Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.” This behavior was repeated every time he saw me, especially in biology class, where he was, of all things, my lab partner, though he never said a word to me. These encounters precluded any closure to the traumatic event, a constant reminder of my helplessness.

As the weeks went by, McVay continued to glower when he saw me, though he would sometimes throw in a simple, not unfriendly nod of recognition. It began to dawn on me how afraid he was that I would report the incident, which I never did. I didn’t even tell my parents, for somehow, in my mind, it was not an attempted armed robbery, as it would be in the grown-up world, but the business of boys, and exempt from the purview of grown-up authority. The thought, however, that I might engender fear of any kind in the likes of Ace McVay gave me mild satisfaction, though the fact remained that he and his buddies had committed a felony and had seen me collapse to the ground believing I had fainted. Which of us had the more dreadful secret about the other?

I continued to daydream about revenge and physical destruction in which I would subjugate my tormentor. I thought of enlisting one or more of the tough rocks who hung out at the fence on Mosholu Parkway and appreciated the TeenTones, like the fearsome Lefty Farrell and the borderline psychotic Roy Drillick, who many years later would kill his father and himself. I had visions of them beating McVay and forcing him to apologize to me in a victory of good over evil akin to the Allies over the Nazis. But with Lefty and Roy, it would be more a case of victory of evil over evil, and I concluded that it was nobody’s business but my own—and Percy McVay’s.

The weeks went by, and McVay’s glares began to disappear, replaced by a kind of self-absorption; thoughts, I surmised, that were far from the Reservoir Oval. Perhaps he was contemplating subsequent armed robberies and beatings, or that he was shortly to be expelled from school for nonattendance. The tension in me had abated somewhat as well, but not my desire for vengeance, which I knew realistically would never come.

The TeenTones continued to harmonize and improve, though Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour was still up in the air. We were invited to sing at a couple of local dances, for which we bought red-and-black-striped vests that were cheaper than sport jackets. Though I still enjoyed my involvement, I had developed an ambivalent attitude toward the TeenTones, with whom I made an associative connection to my recent catastrophe. My journey to the rehearsals was now an ordeal, conducted with a vigilance like never before. Every person on the street, every noise and shadow, was cause for alarm, and I did not venture through the gates of the Oval after the daylight hours, preferring the perceived safety of the more populated streets.

One day, sitting with some friends and TeenTones in the huge high school cafeteria, I observed a crowd and potential ruckus at one of the doorways. Arguments and fights in the lunchroom were not uncommon in a building containing several thousand male students, and we were accustomed to watching, fights being more interesting than cafeteria food to teenage boys. I personally hated to fight, as I’ve said, though I had been in a few that were unavoidable. The strange thing was that I loathed the feeling of my fist connecting to someone’s face only slightly less than the feeling of being hit, with its painful, throbbing sting and the need to fight tears.

We ambled over to the tumult, where Bill Haroldson, a lunchroom monitor, was attempting to prevent a boy from ascending the stairs to the halls and classrooms. It was against the rules until one’s lunch period was over, and Billy, a spirited but diminutive kid, meant to enforce them. The miscreant was none other than Ace McVay. Twice Billy tried to block the door and twice McVay arrogantly pushed him aside, having sport with Billy. Finally, McVay took a step back, assumed his macho feet-apart stance, put a suspicious hand in his jacket pocket, and said, “Hey, asshole, you looking for trouble?”

Just then a burly figure broke through the crowd and said, “I handle the trouble here.” It was said in a most understated manner, but it was a dramatic moment, and the crowd hushed. It was Al Gorden, the chief lunchroom monitor, who did not look the part of a tough guy, with his glasses and preppy clothes, but he was strong.

McVay’s smiling face twitched slightly as he observed what seemed to be slightly more even odds. Gorden was a respected guy who would fight only over the proper beef. “Who the fuck are you?” McVay asked with all the confident venom he could muster, and he proceeded to try to exit yet again.

Gorden removed his horn-rims and carefully placed them in his breast pocket as he blocked the door. “I’m in charge here, and you can’t go up into the halls.”

McVay smiled again, or rather smirked that smirk that I knew so well, and looked down at the floor as a ruse. Suddenly, he released a right-hand roundhouse at Al Gorden, who blocked it with his massive forearm. At the same time, Gorden hit the tall, skinny bastard with a powerful left hook to the stomach, which made him grunt like a pig and took the wind out of him, doubling him over.

There was a tense pause as McVay caught his breath and straightened up. It had looked like it was all over with one punch, but “Fuck you,” McVay said, and he put up his dukes to continue. He tried some flailing punches to Al’s head but got caught with a stunning combination to his face that made the sound of smacking meat and bone and sent his head crashing into the steel-meshed glass of the door and his body to the ground.

I found myself biting my lip, and my fists were clenched as if it were I, not Al Gorden, delivering the punishment. Blood was pouring out of McVay’s nose and several of his multitude of pimples, not unlike my fantasies. My fellow students were screaming the usual “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” like convicts at a prison riot. Gorden stood over McVay, fists at the ready, and prepared to stop fighting, when McVay kicked out at his legs, trying to trip him, then rose, all the while cursing: “You motherfucker, I’ll kill you. You’re dead, you fucking Jew bastard.”

Percival McVay had said the wrong thing. Allen Gorden was the child of holocaust survivors—his parents had in fact met at Dachau—and McVay’s words sent the head lunchroom monitor over the top. He grabbed the bleeding, reeling boy by the collar of his black leather jacket and jerked him upright, holding him with his left hand while beating him unmercifully with powerful, true punches with his right fist, grunting loudly with each one like a tennis player on his serve. “What am I? You piece of shit! What am I?”

Gorden’s own lip was bleeding from his teeth biting down on it, and the maniacal look on his face and the intensity of his eyes convinced me that he would kill the boy. A female teacher was screaming for help. McVay was becoming pulp. My fingernails were digging into my palms from the vicarious beating of my archenemy, this villain who had changed my life. Each punch was my punch.

Then, as I looked at the scarlet mess that was McVay’s face, I realized that the savagery of the attack was becoming too painful for me to watch, and I found myself wanting to shout out for Gorden to stop. I did not. A surprising revulsion overtook me. I could not stand more, and was about to turn away when finally Al Gorden desisted his furious attack. He stepped back, a snarling, sweaty animal, and regained control of himself. He stood for a few moments over McVay, like Hemingway over a slain lion. I looked at the vanquished Percival McVay lying half conscious on the floor and tried to drink it in, wanting so much to enjoy it, thinking that it would at last end my preoccupation with the humiliation that had afflicted me since the incident. What a shitty fighter he was. I had never thought I would see this, though wasn’t it what I had hoped for? But the sight gave me no comfort. A tremendous wave of pity replaced the revulsion and the vitriol, and I felt a sudden desire to help McVay up. I did not. I thought of his mother.

A couple of nervous teachers on lunchroom duty, who had sensibly stood back during the fight, helped the pitiful figure to his feet and dabbed his wounds with paper napkins. A few boys taunted him that he had not landed a single punch; perhaps they, too, had been victims of his predatory habits to take such cowardly advantage of his condition. Ding dong the witch was dead. Percy McVay was now off the sociological map at DeWitt Clinton High School. He never returned to school.

With hindsight, I have to admit that his demise afforded me closure of a sort. If I had not seen him so humbled, his power over me—or rather, my mind—might have continued. I slept more soundly, and I had more confidence, and I was a more productive TeenTone from then on. I never saw his face in the flesh again, though I cannot say that I have not seen him in my mind’s eye from time to time; more as the bleeding heap than the terrifying intimidator.

The TeenTones did appear on the Original Amateur Hour, singing an up-tempo version of the Harptones hit “A Sunday Kind of Love.” We were up against NBC’s Cinderella, which had, I’m told, the largest audience up to that time in television history. Only our immediate families watched us, and even that is somewhat doubtful. The TeenTones did not win. We were defeated by a one-armed piano-playing post-office worker from Missouri.