| Chapter 2: | Street Life |
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was used to play this game too. The broom of the broomstick was removed and the stick remained. It was our “baseball” bat. The street was our Yankee Stadium or Polo Grounds. Three bases and home plate were chalked out. If a car was parked in our newly created playing field, we would push it out of the way in “foul territory.” The Braves would then remove their maroon and gold jackets and each was ready to become another Joe DiMaggio. If a car came by, the outfielder would shout “hold it.” On a rare occasion we broke a window and the outfielder would command us to run away with a cry of “cheese it.”
One day I inhaled coal dust for the first and last time. My friend Louie Jap told me we could make a quarter each shoveling coal in Mr. Jim’s basement. I had found a roll of eighteen dollar singles once and took the money to my grandma, but I had never worked for money. I was delighted to have earned my quarter and brought it home to grandma. I was a man at last. When she told grandpa, he went into a rage, the only time he ever got angry with me.
“I will disown you if you ever do that again.”
Grandpa must have known something I didn’t know.
On One Hundred and Sixth Street Louie and I would stop by the house where Burt Lancaster, a Hollywood actor, had once lived. We went inside the hallway and noticed that his parents must still live there because their name was on the mailbox. The hallway had a nice clean smell. In late August of every year of my early childhood grandma and I went to the “Five and Ten” on One Hundred and Sixth Street to buy my school supplies. The smell of those pencils and papers still lingers in my nostrils.