Chapter Three
There used to be a guy, Irving, who came around with his car, a salesman who sold you linens, coats, pants, underwear, or anything out of the back of his car. Sometimes he would come in. People would say, “Here comes the Jew, he’s got the stuff.” He would pull up in the car, go into each apartment, sell a lot of stuff, then you would pay him two dollars a week. He did everything on credit. I liked it because when he came around he would call us over and say, “Go get your mother, I got some nice coats” or something like that. And I’d go, “Ooh ooh ooh, coat, leather jacket!” and he’d say, “Go ahead, tell your mother you want the coat and we can do it for three dollars a week.” So I would get a jacket or a winter coat. I would haunt my mother for it. One time I got a leather jacket from him. It was a bomber jacket, a leather bomber jacket. I had it about two weeks and I was playing stickball right on the block and I put it on the back of a car and then the car drove away. We didn’t know who the car belonged to and the guy kept going, we couldn’t see where and he didn’t hear us. He didn’t stop and I was crying, I didn’t know what to do, how to tell my mother. I knew she was going to kill me. I just couldn’t get over how stupid I was for putting my coat on the car. I went back in the house and did she get angry. “Goddammit, what’s the matter with you! For Christ’s sakes you know you got this jacket and now I gotta pay for it and now I am paying for something you don’t even have anymore! Now what are you going to do for the rest of the winter!”
Thanksgiving my mother would cook a dinner. There was always somebody drunk or something happening, my brothers would be fighting in the house. The cops came to my house all the time because of my brothers’ fighting. Or my mother fighting with my father. We had a kitchen table to sit around but you could never all eat together. It was a table for six people, maybe four, so you ate in shifts. My mother put up another table in the living room and mostly the kids ate in the living room. Or the adults would eat in the living room and we’d eat in the kitchen. My mother would invite people over. She was a very good cook, the turkey, the whole thing. They’d be drinking all day, starting the night before, when the holidays were coming. They were getting bombed worse than they usually did. The whole Christmas season it was okay for everybody to get drunk because it was Christmas, so from Thanksgiving on it was a fucking disaster. On the whole block there were quite a few drunks and drinkers. Red, upstairs in the building, he’d be fighting with the Italians across the street and my brothers would be fighting with the Mackies next door. Larry would be fighting with his mother, it was all a fucking disaster. It was terrible.
Sitting on my stoop and watching while playing with some of the girls and guys, if my father came down the block and he was drunk, the kids would say, “Here comes your father, oh look at him, he’s drunk!” You would know because he came around walking or staggering very slowly, to go from Nineteenth Street to the house it took him half an hour. He was that bombed. He’d bounce off every car, every wall, and I was very ashamed. Nobody would say too much to me, sometimes they knew how much it hurt. They wouldn’t go, “Oh yeah your father’s a drunk” because everybody on the block had somebody who drank or did something. Everybody had “skeletons in the closet.” The women had all different boyfriends coming to their houses, not a boyfriend, but boyfriends. “That’s my boyfriend!” or “That’s a friend” or “That’s the kid’s uncle,” but meanwhile the kids say, “Is that your uncle?” “My uncle who? That’s not my uncle.” We would lie about who was in the house; it was like a big Peyton Place. Even as kids, we knew all the shit that was going on, but we just didn’t say nothing to people.
I used to go over to see Mrs. Nedemski, the greatest woman with flowers. She had a backyard that was full of plants and for some reason I was very drawn to the flowers and what she did. I learned a lot from her. As a little kid I would go into the cemetery and steal bushes for her, like azaleas or lilies. I would tell her I got them from somewhere else, and she would pay me fifty cents. Even after a funeral I would get her flowers. I would dig up big sunflowers. She had the only yard that was beautiful.
There was a yard in the back of all the buildings. Ours was on the first floor. The first floor had the yard and most times the superintendent had the yard. From the first floor you could jump out the window and jump back in. After the Petersons left we were the super for many years, which meant you got free rent or half your rent paid and you had access to the cellar and to the backyard, where I later grew marijuana. I grew string beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, all kinds of stuff. I always liked to water and watch them grow—the peppers came out nice and the tomatoes came out good—and we used a lot of it in the house. My mother would say, “No, I ain’t gonna use any of that, it’s got cat piss on it!” but it was good.
People would hang out their clothes in the backyards and you could go down Nineteenth Street and see some of the alleyways where they would talk to each other hanging out the windows. “Mrs. Peterson, how ya doin’?” “Mrs. Whalen, Mrs. Kennick.” “Hi May!” (my mother’s name was Sally but everybody called her May). They would talk back and forth, from one building right over to my mother’s house looking out the window. Nobody in the neighborhood had telephones. Matter of fact, there was no TV on the whole block. The only TV was on the corner, at Rignola’s. You sent notes across to people. “Here’s a note, go give this to Mrs. Moore, give this to so-and-so.” They’d yell out the window if they wanted to borrow two dollars or a cup of sugar, a container of milk or some butter, or they would send you with a note. I would just walk over and give them the note and I’d wait and they’d say, “Tell your mother I’m a little short this week and I don’t have it.” I’d go, “Okay” and go back, or they would write a little thing on the note and I would give the note back to my mother. I hated doing it, it was very embarrassing, but she made me do it. My mother would say, “But do you want this?” and she would bribe me, she’d be like, “If I get this, you can buy ice cream, go ahead, I’ll get you an ice cream.” If I wanted it bad enough I would go and do it. Sometimes I did but sometimes I didn’t.
I was a little messenger for my mother. When she got into drinking really heavily, she would hock stuff in the hock shop, like my father’s suit. How could his own wife hock his only suit? Or she would hock her wedding ring, which was a piece of gold, and she would get two or three dollars, which was enough for her to buy a six-pack. A six-pack was a dollar and she would get some potatoes or something and come back home and make dinner. When my father would get his pay, she would go back to the hock shop, pay the three dollars and get her ring back. She used to do this every other week. It was like a secret and she would say, “Don’t tell your father, don’t tell your father,” and I’d say, “Ma, he’s gonna find out about the suit,” and she’d go, “No, he don’t have no reason to wear it. He’s not gonna look and I’ll tell him it’s in the cleaners. Don’t worry about that.” He would look for his suit on Sunday and he would say, “Goddammit, you hocked it!” and then he would look at me and say, “You know.” He knew I was in on it.
Even when she kept me home from school, if one of my brothers was coming home or coming into the house, I would have to go into the bedroom and hide under the bed so he wouldn’t see me, so she wouldn’t get into trouble for keeping me home from school. I did that a lot of times, I was always hiding in a closet. I didn’t want to go to school but she kept me home anyways. She could have tried to teach me at home, but she didn’t. My mother never taught me how to write a thing. She never had me hold a pen, she never sat down with me and said, “Here’s how you spell Bobby.” I went to school not even knowing how to write my own name.
All the other kids were writing and reading out of a book a little bit. They’d ask me and I’d say, “I can’t, I don’t know how to read.” I think I’d missed a year because of my age. My birthday was September 30th but school started at the beginning of September, so I didn’t go to school until they could get me in. There was no kindergarten, this was Brooklyn. There might have been a kindergarten but in our family we could have thought it was only for rich people. Anyway, I didn’t go to kindergarten.
As a kid I got into so much trouble. I set the factory on fire, it had bales of papers and I just went into the back with a girl and a couple of other guys and put a cigarette inside a book of matches near the papers. Later on it just went poof! This whole factory was on fire, a blazing seven-alarm fire, firemen all over the place.
When the fire started, I ran home. I looked out the window and saw all these lights and firemen but I wouldn’t come out of the house during the whole fire. The block was a mess of fire engines, ambulances, people playing in the street, the firemen overcome with smoke. This factory went up in flames because it was all wooden floors, everything in there went up like a matchbook. Then the other factory across the street, later on when I was a teenager, I set that on fire too, but it was an empty factory at the time because they were building the expressway. I also liked to set off false alarms. They’ve disconnected a lot of the alarms now.
In the summertime my mother and them used to put me away. They’d send me away to homes because I was in so much trouble on the street with the neighbors, the cops, the gangs, and kids. They sent me to Pennsylvania or upstate, to really good homes for troubled kids. The Catholic Society or the Fresh Air Fund. One family was the Miners in Pennsylvania, Mr. and Mrs. Miner, and they had two sons a little older than me. Until I went there to live with them I didn’t even know most people put two sheets on a bed. For the most part they showed me a lot of love, a lot of care, but I was still very mischievous. They had a popcorn concession stand and used to sell things at concerts and fairs. Mr. Miner worked a regular job but he had this sideline, the weekend gig. He made cotton candy at these events, and had soda and popcorn. They would have these little festivals, music things on the weekends—carnivals, county fairs. I would go with him and help him. They’d even let me help him make the cotton candy. Then I would steal some money. I would try to drink a beer in the barn, ‘cause he had beers stacked up in there. It was in my head just to take them. I was in a car accident while I was there. I bit a piece of my tongue off when I went through the windshield of a car, a station wagon. We had all these popcorn seeds all over the place. My mother and them never sued or anything like that, which they should have because it fucked up my mouth.
The Miners took me to the ocean one time and I floated on a big tractor tube and kept going so far out until I couldn’t see any land. They had to come out and get me because I couldn’t get back, I didn’t know how to swim and it was scary. I did stuff like that not knowing. But every summer my parents sent me somewhere. One time I went to a place called Bishop McDonald’s Camp. I hated it. I was with all these kids and I cried every day. I was around seven or eight and I didn’t want to be there. They set all the kids in one spot and gave us postcards to write home, but I didn’t know how to write. I felt terrible even though one of the counselors came over to help me. I didn’t want to sleep in the dorms. I did get a little bit comfortable after a day or two, but I wondered, “Why do they always send me away?” The more they sent me away, the more rebellious I got. “You’re gonna do this? Fine, fuck it, I’ll show ya.” I thought everything they did wasn’t good for me. I never had any say in the matter. They’d say, “You’re going away this summer to a farm, there’s gonna be cows there,” and I’d say, “I don’t want to go to no farm. What the fuck am I gonna do on a farm? I’m gonna miss the whole summer with everybody in Brooklyn.”
I was always getting hurt. One summer I was on the back of a bike with this guy Sally and a car hit the back of the bike. My foot slipped into the spokes of the wheel and I got my whole foot tore up. I scraped all the skin off to the bone on my ankle. I had twenty, thirty, forty stitches. It was in the beginning of the summertime and I wanted to ride on my bike but I had to sit on the stoop and put my foot up. I was lucky to have the big specialist stitch it, but the scars are still on my ankle because I went back out on the bike about a month after they took out the stitches and then the whole thing came open. I told my mother, “I’m not going back there, they’re not doing no more, just leave it,” I didn’t give a fuck how it looked, and now it looks like skin graft all over because the skin stretched on my whole ankle. It would hurt if I got kicked there because there’s only one little layer of skin, very pink scar tissue right on the ankle just below the anklebone, in the back of the foot where I had a big piece chopped out of it when the spokes all crumpled up. I was holding my neck saying, “Please help me.” My foot was just dangling. I remember it dangling in midair. The guy in the car took me to the hospital and my mother came down. They let him get away. I probably could have sued and got a fortune.
From ten to fourteen years old, before we really got into the gang stuff, I was kind of lost. I was very shy, even around the girls. I always felt different than the other kids. If you see a picture of me, the broken tooth, my teeth were green because I didn’t go to the dentist. We never had any money even though my father worked. People ask me do I remember when the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly died in the plane crash. That was a tragedy, but even something like that we blew off. Our life was a tragedy, in our four-mile neighborhood there wasn’t one person that was fucking normal. Not that I could see anyway. People never told you to stop doing nothing. Take a bat and go split somebody’s skull open and they’d go, “He fucking deserved that. It’s a good thing you got him because I was ready to do it.” You’d have to sit down and eat a body in the middle of the street to be like, “Oh, that’s really crazy.” Anything other than that and you were normal in the neighborhood.