CHAPTER 45

Tuckahoe

Even after the Great Potato Rebellion the boys at the H were still beaten for insubordination. We still had detention. But the frequency, the severity, the gross injustice, and a certain relish on the faces of the supervisors disappeared with the Colonel. Meanwhile, we stayed hungry. Hungrier than ever. I was twelve when the stock market crashed, thirteen when the banks closed, fourteen when 20,000 war veterans descended on the US Capitol demanding their bonus pay. The tabloids called them the Veterans’ Bonus Army. My mother wrote the American Legion; they suggested she have my father declared dead so she could receive his benefits, should the Veterans’ Bonus Army succeed. Unfortunately, Herbert Hoover suggested General MacArthur set fire to the veterans’ camp, which MacArthur took literally, burning the place to the ground.

Any hope we Homeboys had that the fortunes of our deserted mothers and widower fathers were going to change for the better turned to Okie dust during the Depression. We read the newspapers with increasing interest and spent a great deal of time hanging out in the Oracle offices arguing the nuances of left-wing politics and writing our editorials. Although we were forbidden to attend rallies by the rabbis, we were always on the lookout for action. During a senior outing in Brooklyn, we came upon an anti-communist demonstration in Prospect Park that we razzed considerably.

I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, but I had mixed feelings about joining the Party. I wanted to redistribute the wealth into my own pocket for a while. After that, I’d save the rest of the world. At that time, my plan was to finish school, get a job, and join the bourgeoisie. My mother could quit working at Kohl’s. I’d come home with a fat paycheck, buy her fancy dresses, diamonds, and furs. I’d take her out for steak. Not once, but regularly, we’d go out for steak dinners.

That was my plan, but I had plenty of time until graduation. I was in no rush. My life had gotten pretty easy on the inside. As a senior inmate, I had no monitors in charge of me any longer. I was managing editor of the paper (Jesse was editor) with my own joint in the suite of Oracle offices on the ground floor next to the gym with my own desk and cabinets, my sanctum sanctorum, where I could do whatever I wanted in privacy. That was where I wrote the news stories and editorials for the Oracle. But also, Harry and I built a ham radio in there, and on occasion Jesse and I got drunk in my joint on homemade hooch—before Prohibition was repealed, and after. Privately, I scribbled at my desk, mostly poetry, some serious, some doggerel. I’d taken a picture with the newspaper’s Brownie camera of Louis Longbeard wagging his finger at us one day after a trip into Manhattan. The photograph inspired some rhyming couplets and that’s what got me started on my Picture Booke.

The Sermon At the Gates

Upon his pulpit at the HNOH gates

Louis Longbeard rants and prates

“In hell’s hot fires you’ll get burned

Yea! All ye prodigals returned.

Back from New York carousing you come

Laughing, gay, and sot with rum.

Fresh out of wicked old New York,

Bellies full of Armour’s pork.

A hundred rabbis here have taught you.

A thousand siddurs we have bought you.

With praying bees and fasting bouts

You still remain a bunch of louts.

By this white beard that floats upon the breeze,

If you commit such sins as these

And with the devil cast your lot

A million prayers will help you not.”

And ranting thusly onward, Louie

Is greeted with loud cries of Phooey

As off we trot in joyful glee

A score of sinful orphans we.

My buddies liked my verse well enough, so I went into Yonkers and bought a photo album at the Five and Dime, and since the pages were black, a bottle of white ink for the fountain pen the Loving Mothers Auxiliary gave each of us for our bar mitzvah and that, astonishingly, I hadn’t yet lost, and I used the white ink for the captions.

I didn’t always get the best grades in school—some of the teachers hated me because they thought I thought I was smarter than they were, which I did think, and this led them to predict I would come to no good, joining the prophesies of Louis Longbeard and Miss Claire Beaufort. I was a smart aleck, a wisenheimer. And yet, also thin-skinned. Not a good combination, Hoffman frequently pointed out. I had been known to get into shouting matches with my elders when challenged or mocked.

Hot-headed, yes, but no one could refute my talents after I won a countywide essay contest and got to read my paper over the radio. My essay was all about what the New Deal meant to us destitute and neglected children. I thought it was possible I might receive a letter from my father telling how he’d been listening to WCOH, and just imagine his surprise when my name was announced and he heard my voice and what I’d written, and how proud he was, and how if I’d allow it, he’d like to get to know me. Aw, fuck. What a load of crap. But I did win the contest.

Meanwhile, I’d been hearing from Vivian that it was getting tougher for Mama making ends meet with Alvin growing out of his clothes every other week and hungry all the time and somebody else who preferred to remain nameless coveting dresses and dainty shoes for dance parties if she was to have any chance of hunting down and trapping a Rockefeller. I kept thinking about the months’ worth of paychecks I could be earning going down the drain while I sat in a classroom arguing with dim-witted teachers. I made up my mind to quit school, go home to my mother after all these years, and support my family like a man.

“Now class, what scene in the story would you say is the denouement?” asked Miss Campbell, head of the English department at Roosevelt High.

I raised my hand. “It’s pronounced day-new-mawh,” I said. “I’m pretty sure,” I added, although I was positive. “Not dayna-mint.”

Miss Campbell curled her lip. “How would you know?” she said. “You’re from the Home, aren’t you?”

“Lemme see! Lemme see!” The guys couldn’t get enough of my Olde Picture Booke. I was leaving the H, and this was their last chance. Al Shack grabbed the album away and they took turns reading the captions, and honestly, I couldn’t say I minded. Their laughter was like heroin shot into a vein. Pure bliss. Jesse had the book and he was reading my tribute to Carl Grimm, smiling ear-to-ear and nodding—the response I treasured most from the friend I treasured most: I get it. I feel the same way.

Carl Grimm, second chef, bon vivant, and great friend to us.

In the background is his cottage, shared with Charlie and Hymie

Wherein upon a score of joyful occasions

We caroused in rowdy revelry drinking deep and eating full

Until, the dawn approaching,

We’d file back to our beds, the shouted imprecations

Of awakened orphans mingling with our woeful groans

To render horrid welcome to the morning sun.

Mr. Grimm’s great generosity in frequent dispensing

Of ’tween meal snacks

From the full larders of the underground storerooms,

His picturesque unfolding to us monastical orphans

Of the joys and glamour of the world awaiting,

His full appreciation of all things creative and artistic,

His sensitive nature that knows not what hate,

Nor animosity means—for all these things,

We will miss him most when we leave. —August, 1934

Jesse liked the one about himself as well:

Jesse Hoffman, my boon companion and a partner upon many an enterprise. He leads a sorry life for he would be a tympanist and must practice upon drums calling forth the wrath of Louis of the Long Beard and Eddie the night watchman who would chop meat and sleep respectively.

Harry didn’t sit with us on the porch, although it was his last day, too. He was nearby, tinkering with the Indian Scout motorcycle he bought for ten bucks. Somehow he managed to scrounge up the dough. As soon as he heard I was dropping out of school, he bailed, too. From the steps I watched as he kept climbing on the bike in the driveway and revving it up whenever he felt he had to divert attention away from me. Chick called him over to look at a snapshot someone had taken of Harry and me that I’d included in the album but Harry declined the invitation, revved his motor and took his iron charger for a spin around the circular drive.

I mixed in a few shots I’d taken one Passover of my sister Vivian posing coyly on the roof at 166th Street that elicited close inspection and some wolf whistles, and a few of my mother in a hat and white gloves. There were snapshots of the B. A. swimming hole, of course. I looked out at Harry in the driveway. We had waited ten years for this moment. We were finally going home, yet here I was dragging my feet, feeling I could linger on this stoop with my friends forever. On the last page of the Picture Booke, I had placed an interior shot of my Oracle office with this caption:

My joint: the gathering place for the intelligentsia and social leaders of our time. Thither we cracked jokes, or sat listening to an opera, or argued the merits of Jean Harlow’s figure, or in hushed whispers planned a raid upon an icebox. Thither we developed pictures, and thither we made footlights and radios and spotlights and airplanes. We repaired us bicycles, we sold candy, we wrote editorials. Thither in winter we stored us sleds, in summer we loaded knapsacks.

Aye verily, a Garden of Eden. I closed the album. It was time to go. The joys and glamour of the wider world awaited.