Brooklyn:
Cement schoolyards and tarred streets were their learning centers. Asphalt jungles didn’t care for grass, trees, or bunnies. The only things Brooklyn boys knew were stooped ball, baseball cards, the Brooklyn Dodgers, yo-yos and fighting. Bullies and goons-controlled Brooklyn. A goon is a big bully. They hated me (Robert) because they couldn’t catch me or be me.
Flatbush was the roughest neighborhood in Brooklyn, even the States. Comprised of old walk-up row houses, three to four floors high. Cement stoops and sidewalks anchored the tenements down. The neighborhoods went back to a time when the factory owners needed obedient people.
A timeworn elevated (EL) subway, looped the district, providing income and escapes to Coney Island for the workers and their families. Laborers filled the subway cars in the morning and emptied them at night where hypnotizing blinking bar signs guided their march down the elevator’s steps and into a nest of taverns; the surrounding elevator’s steel girders imprisoned everyone.
Work seemed to be hanging around. Where it came from and where it went is not known. People had money in their pockets until it was Friday and then they got more work. Where it came from and where it went is not known. The fathers went to work, drank their beer and some of them beat up their wives.
Meanwhile, their beautiful offspring roamed the streets with nothing to do but join gangs and tortured the general population. In time, they would find out they were just punks. Flatbush wasn’t a blue-collar class neighborhood; It was a no-class one.