Everyone said Eggplant Alley was a lovely place. In the old days.
Way back in the old days, Eggplant Alley was a clean apartment complex tucked into a happy corner of the Bronx. There were thick shade trees in the courtyard and kids everywhere. The kids played jump rope, hopscotch, tag, cowboys and Indians, stickball. Late in the afternoons, the courtyard was scented by suppers cooking. In the blue dusk, the fathers trudged home from work—tired men, carrying empty lunch boxes and afternoon newspapers. They climbed the hill, and they saw the trees and the three red-brick buildings, and they smelled the suppers, and the men knew they were at home in Eggplant Alley. They thought it was the finest place in the world.
All that was long ago, in the old days, in the black-and-white days before Nicky Martini was born.
Also known as the good old days. Nicky was too young to remember these good old days, but he heard an awful lot about them. He was practically an expert.
NICKY WAS a little kid when the changes fell on Eggplant Alley. This happened in the early 1960s. The changes plopped down like water balloons from the heavens, practical jokes from the angels.
First went the trees. Nicky didn’t know what kind of trees they were and he didn’t catch the name of the disease that killed them. But he watched fascinated on the summer afternoon when the workmen came and sawed the trees down and cut them up. Nicky was just six years old at the time. So he waved bye-bye as the men hauled the pieces out to the trucks.
The landlords of Eggplant Alley replanted. But one night juvenile delinquents swarmed through and ripped the tender little replacements out of the ground and threw them into the street. Just for fun. That was the kind of neighborhood it was becoming. After that, the landlords of Eggplant Alley figured, why bother?
Grandma Martini had three favorite sayings, the third of which applies here:
1. Telling lies is like eating garlic.
2. Never sleep with an itchy dog, unless you intend to scratch.
3. One thing leads to another.
One thing led to another in Eggplant Alley.
A first-floor window was broken and the window was left unfixed. So another window was broken. Tires were slashed. A bike was stolen. The Fuller Brush man was robbed of his brushes. Parcel post packages went missing from welcome mats, and then the welcome mats themselves began to disappear. Someone took up peeing in the elevator. The Rotinos’ hot new Pontiac Bonneville convertible was swiped from the parking garage beneath Building B, plucked straight out of the belly of Eggplant Alley.
And one cold February night, the McCarthys—residents of Building C, first floor rear—came home and found a hobo eating Cheez Doodles in Mr. McCarthy’s recliner. The man was drunk and stinky, and when he fled, he took the new TV Guide with him. No one understood why he needed a TV Guide if he didn’t have a television. Dad offered, “Maybe he wants to know what he’s missing.” The incident inspired all first-floor residents to install window bars. And for a few months, Mom flatly refused to purchase snack foods. “They just attract bums,” she said.
One thing led to another and another, and before you knew it, nobody wanted to live in Eggplant Alley anymore.
The kids moved away. In one autumn alone, Jimmy Scarole, Bobby Sciatti, Paulie Capicola, and Iggy Schwartz took off with their families. They poured out of Eggplant Alley like refugees fleeing a war zone. They went north to Westchester, west to New Jersey, east to Long Island. Anywhere that wasn’t Eggplant Alley.
The day after Nicky’s twelfth birthday, the Abbananzos cleared out to California. This was particularly bad luck for Nicky, who had recently noticed Andrea Abbananzo’s bluish black hair and the way it shimmered in the elevator light.
Nicky grew accustomed to good-byes. That was one good thing about growing up in Eggplant Alley. You learned how to say good-bye. You got plenty of practice. One day, you play GI Joes and Operation with a kid. Next day, you wave bye-bye at the taillights of his family’s Chevrolet as it rolls away, gone forever, down Summit Avenue, Eggplant Alley in their rearview mirror. Everyone said “We’ll stay in touch,” but no one ever stayed in touch. They preferred to leave Eggplant Alley right where it was, where it belonged—in the rearview mirror.
Nicky was sad to lose playmates, but he did not cry during the good-byes. He’d wave so long, go upstairs, watch The Soupy Sales Show on television, eat a grilled cheese and chocolate milk lunch, get over it, move on. This was easy because as far as he was concerned, his best pal was and always would be his big brother, Roy.