THREE

                                     Teddy, on 16th Avenue in Borough Park, late 1970's

                       Ted, me, Kelly & Diana pose in front of my old apartment building, late 1970's

    Borough Park, Brooklyn, also known as Boro Park, the latter spelling an acceptable one but the former one preferred, was a Jewish “ghetto” in the best sense. Here, Jews ruled as kings and queens over their destinies, a wonderful amalgam of religious and secular people completely in their comfortable element. Indeed, you would have to wander several blocks away at least, to gaze curiously at the seemingly out-of-place Catholic Church. On 13^th Avenue, BP’s main shopping strip, our “adopted” people, the Chinese, waited to serve us their exotic food. Hey, we loved America and always will, taking and adopting from each culture the best it has to offer. From the Chinese-Americans, not only eggrolls but Mah Jongg, from the Latin-Americans cha-cha-cha and other 'dirty' dancing (clean as a Jewish kitchen on Passover morning compared with now-a-days), and from the Italians, well let me just say (and I say this with pride, however misplaced) that many of our lads served with them in America’s underground economy. Bugsy Siegel’s monetary contributions, for example, towards the eventual liberation of our motherland are well-known (speaking of Israel, here, not Borough Park).

    People of color were admittedly scarce in BP (note: I’m being lazy here, BP is not an acceptable name for Borough Park) as I’ve already mentioned. The superintendents of the apartment buildings on the three corners of our block were all Caucasian to a point, until our building hired a black 'super'. He and his family, in fact, were the first African-Americans (still referred to as “Negroes” then, and worse) I met up close. If it weren’t for Amos & Andy being part of my TV addiction, along with Buckwheat on the Little Rascals and Rochester on the Jack Benny show, I might have been oblivious to the varieties of pigmentations common to human life forms on this planet. Cantonese cuisine will always ‘reign supreme’ with us. And then there was the Alan Freed radio & TV show and Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”, the cultural icons that truly first taught me the incredible contributions to the entertainment industry made by Black America. Surely, Rock and Roll has been a, if not the, major force in the war against bigotry and prejudice. It was Rock & Roll, not Borough Park or my family that helped me to grow up “color-blind”. Although I can credit Borough Park in one sense; what little Bible I was willing to learn at the Chaim N. Bialik Yiddish Folk School on 16^th Avenue, showed me that G-d created us “perfect”, the Hebrew says, out of the red dirt of the earth. Even Adam & Eve were not 'white'. Our division over such an immutable fact of birth as skin color is a hideous anomaly. The Bible taught me that much, even back then; G-d created a single race of humans.

    But my concern at six years of age, beyond squeezing my parents for money to buy the latest rock & roll 45, was that most of the girls I was interested in were Italian. Besides the very real problems that couples made up of different religions face, Jewish people believe that intermarrying can eventually decimate Judaism as much or more than Hitler did, if allowed to go unchecked. Religious Jews have such large families for that reason, our survival as a people. And as I’ve said, if there are no Jewish leaders to cry out that phrase to G-d at the opportune moment, Messiah won’t come. But G-d’s promises must come to pass or He is a liar. The Jewish people will never disappear from this Earth. None of this mattered to me, however, while I was lusting after these six-year-old Italian Catholic sweeties.

    The first “real” object of my lust was my first grade school chum ‘Mary’ (OK, her name I’ll change; she’s probably still alive, why embarrass her). Previously my flame had been Vera-Ellen in the movie “White Christmas” but my dad assured me that when I became marriageable age she’d be too old for me. But he took a little more seriously my desire for Mary, who I announced to him my desire to marry. Italian girls were treif (unkosher), forbidden, ‘not for us’. Not that Mary ever returned my glances; still my fantasy life changed that year. I mainly fantasized that I was a teenage gang leader named “Lee”, but now I had a fantasy “moll” at my side. In the second grade I had my eye on the slimmer of two Italian sisters and invited them both to a party at my place. I remember one of them bringing along a little book, a catechism to study while at my house or perhaps it was more a charm to protect her against Lenny the ‘G-d killer’? I was a cute little kid back then, but no Romeo. While handsome, I was short, weak and puny.

Plus I had an embarrassing (although not to me) bad habit, of grabbing myself in the crotch. I don’t know where I’d picked this up from; had I seen an older kid do this? Or was it just an outgrowth of my earlier habit of sleeping with my covers tightly between my legs? I’ve heard that Jewish boys become sexually stimulated at an earlier age than most due to their circumcision at eight days old. Dear reader, I would have left this out of my book if it were not integral to my story of ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll’. I am picturing many of you returning this book to the Christian bookstore at this point and angrily demanding a refund. Please feel free; I can only clean my story up so much. Actually I can remember seeing Jewish doo-wop street singers with one hand raised toward Heaven, and the other ‘copping their groin’. Yes, even in Borough Park.

I’ll never forget my first day of school at P.S. 164, and it is easily understandable why the six-year-old girls in my class were not interested in me, aside from the fact that they were six and not perverts like myself. When my mother delivered me to class that day, I still had my baby bottle with me and was still drinking from it. The class exploded in laughter! I had my mom stay with me the entire day which turned out to finally be the day I was weaned. I had never been breast-fed; my mother’s doctors had advised her against it because of her heart condition. Stupid doctors.

There were attractive girls in my ‘micro-neighborhood’ as well, being the apartment buildings on three of the four corners of 47^th Street and 15^th Avenue. Most of the kids I hung out with lived in these three six-story buildings. Mine had no girls our age, but my best friends lived there, Teddy, Pete & Jules. Les and Bob lived across 47^th, along with Julie (notice: name change) and Penny (real name retained to illustrate the fact that it rhymed with mine, but also so that you can imagine how we ribbed her about being worth one cent and other mean things that kids said back then).

Also in that building lived the great unrequited love of my life, Sue (not her name). Being a year younger than us and not in our grade at school, she was not part of our peer group. But I secretly loved her from afar, once braving Halloween night alone to lay a gift at her door. I did get 'chalked' by a group of older kids who grabbed me in the lobby of my building, but it was worth it. Once, when we were in high school, I summoned the nerve to call her and ask for a date. She was busy on both nights I’d suggested, she was beautiful after all, dark complexion and perfect features, and while I’d heard through a friend that she really did want me to call back I never did. Lucky for her. A few years ago, while reminiscing on a New Utrecht internet bulletin board about just such things, someone told me they knew Sue and could get me her address. But what would I say to her now?

I had two sweethearts in the third building, in my mind at least, Arlene & Lucille, their real names as I’ve nothing potentially embarrassing to say about them. There was that first game of “spin the bottle”, of course, that was as exciting as it was innocent but it led to nothing else. I felt a great loss when Lucille moved away, somewhere down south as I recall where I’d never see her again. My favorite memory of Arlene was the day we were searching through a closet in her apartment (for what I don’t remember) and I found some of her older brother’s 45’s. She got his permission to give me a rare Velvetones record on Aladdin (“I Found My Love”); wish I still had it. We also had a male friend in that building named Rance, but weren’t allowed to play at his place since it was full of antiques. He snuck us in one time when his parents weren’t home, and it was like visiting a museum. Rance took his role as curator and tour guide, explaining the significance of some of the pieces. 

Teddy’s cousin Jan also lived there. Before leaving this topic I must say that these three buildings yielded great booty on Halloween. We would knock on every door, even the ones we knew contained Hasidim who did not share our interest in that holiday. One year the school guilt-tripped us to “trick-or-treat for Unicef”, which was boring and we never did it again. But it gave Teddy and I a great memory when one older man listening to our plea through his door exclaimed, “but the hour is late” in his eastern-European accent. We laughed for years, literally; if either of us ever said that, we’d crack up all over again. You had to be there, I guess.

I don’t mean to suggest by that crack about Unicef that we were entirely selfish. Just like in Woody Allen’s movie “Radio Days”, we would roam the neighborhood with little blue charity boxes called pushkes to raise money for Israel, and unlike Woody’s character in that movie, we actually turned the money in, although I’d be lying if I said that stealing it never crossed our minds.

Growing up in New York City, especially in a safe neighborhood like mine, was a great blessing. In those days, while we heard rumors of crime, and even news stories that were certainly not rumors, they were always about somebody else in another neighborhood. I admit that when mob boss Albert Anastasia was killed while getting a haircut in 1957, I became afraid of barber shops and refused to get a haircut for months. My father laughed and explained that it had nothing to do with me or our neighborhood hair-cutters, but it took me awhile to get comfortable about it. When one of the kids in my class got 'nits', bugs in his hair, suddenly keeping my hair trim took on new meaning, however.

Another vague fear my friends and I had was of a gang known as the “Baldies”. We knew that they had shaved heads, so we were always on the lookout for bald people, but never saw any, at least not any that were young. In reality, they were not bald at all, nor did they scalp their victims. One gang we did actually see, from a nearby neighborhood, was an offshoot of the “Golden Guineas”; but they were really a social group, harmless greasers typical of the era. Crime was truly rare in Boro Park, with many if not most residents leaving their apartments and even cars unlocked most of the time.

A typical day in my ‘hood would begin with the sound of horse-drawn wagons bedecked with cowbells, and push-cart merchants. One vivid memory is of the fish seller pushing his small cart through the early morning street yelling: “ay-oh-ay, w-oh-oh-oh ay-oh-ay”; and then after several of those the closer, loud enough to wake anyone still asleep, “I got FISH!” You know Teddy and I loved imitating that guy! There were also fruit and vegetable sellers, and later in the day the ubiquitous Good Humor ice cream push-carts. The latter had a promotional campaign going for awhile where they would give you a numbered ticket each time you bought a frozen treat, with a comic strip character on it. Then you would check your number in the newspaper, and if you were lucky would win a cash prize. The vendors were very competitive and soon began handing out two or three tickets with a purchase, then whole handfuls of tickets. My friends and I collected huge piles of tickets with Dick Tracy or Little Orphan Annie on them, and a character known as the Schmoo, a holdover from decades earlier. But none of us ever won any money that I remember. My favorite morning vendor was the Dugan’s Bakery truck; I’d zoom downstairs to buy a box of 6 cupcakes with thick frosting, two white, two pink and two chocolate. I’d admire their beauty, especially the lovely pink color, running my finger over the tactile surface. Then I’d peel the frosting off and throw it away and only eat the delicious golden cake below.

There were push-carts at school as well, mainly the sellers of soft nickel salt-pretzels. These were eaten either plain or with a squeeze of mustard. Typically the vendors were elderly Jewish men, and each had their own corner. But one day in 1960, a guy a block away from Montauk Junior High dropped his price to 2 for a nickel, and the pretzel war began. When the price dropped to 3 for a nickel, and it was impossible to eat three of these things, we all began throwing them at each other and even at the old Jewish guys. When the bell rang at the end of lunchtime, the entire schoolyard was littered with chunks of soft pretzel inches deep in places. The candy-apple sellers did well after the pretzel war; we were sick of pretzels.

There are a few other highlights of Junior High days that still come to mind. If you live in a hurricane area of the country, it would be a commonplace thing, but the only hurricane I ever experienced caused the school’s windows and doors to be locked one day at lunch time. We could watch the wind whipping around through the windows, and the pretzels and their sellers flying by. Just kidding. At 3:00 we were allowed to leave; the sidewalks were all strewn with leaves. Another unforgettable event took place while I was yet a 'freshie' in the 7^th grade. I’d heard that the seniors routinely beat the freshmen up, but in my case a kid named John, (I say kid, but he looked at least 20 to me; must have been left back a few times) flung a metal trashcan cover from across the street, over the schoolyard fence, and hit me on the back. Ouch! John, if you’re still alive and reading this, I forgive you. It didn’t result in any lifelong back problems.

In those days if you were bright enough and had at least a 130 I.Q. you could skip eighth grade thus get through Junior High in only two years. The IQ tests were administered in sixth grade and the scores were kept secret. If you were admitted to the “SP” (special progress? stupid pest?) program you’d be alerted only at the very last minute. I became obsessed to find out my IQ score. As much as I hated school, the idea of skipping a year sounded great. And if I didn’t make it, I wouldn’t be in the same class as most of my friends who definitely had the requisite smarts. I noticed that the teacher had a folder on her desk that had a card for every student corresponding with their seats. So I began to sneak up to her desk any time I could think of an excuse to do so. One kid had only a 70 IQ; others hovered around 100, the so-called average. Eventually I saw my card; mine was 136. I would be in class 7sp1 the following year. My best friend Teddy’s score was a bit under the sacred mark, however, which caused him great distress. I’m glad they no longer give those tests, although public schools are way worse today than 50 years ago.