As distasteful as it might sound, that game, for all its potential for inflicting pain and damage — bruised limbs, cut lips, and boxed ears — always seemed fun: I particularly took to it, what with having so much pent-up something inside of me. I’m proud to say that I never went home crying afterward, even felt good that such a formerly sick wimp could hold his own, though I would get beaten with a belt by my mother if I came back with a broken pair of eyeglasses or a tornup and/or bloodied shirt.
Mainly, I will say this about my block: A lot of tough working-class kids lived on it, and while there were a few serious delinquents among them who spent time away in juvenile facilities for burglary, and in one instance, for dropping a tile off a tenement rooftop on a passerby, blinding him, the majority were merely mischievous, though a few were simply mean. I almost had my eyes put out by this older fellow named Michael Guiling, the kind of teenager capable of fastening what were called cherry bombs, a high explosive, to pigeons. (I know, it’s hard to imagine the process, let alone the outcome, but I once saw him tying one of those bombs to a pigeon and lighting the fuse; he let that bird go, and, flying away, it blew up in midair.) He had a thing for fireworks and, for the hell of it, a happy smile on his face, once flung a cherry bomb at my face; if I hadn’t stepped aside, who knows what would have happened. (He was just one of those cruel lost souls — years later, sometime in the early 1970s, he’d die of a heroin overdose in the men’s room of a bar on 110th Street, most popular with Columbia University students, a dive called the Gold Rail.)
Down the street, toward the drive, lived a giant fellow — six feet five and probably weighing three hundred pounds, his nickname, naturally, was “Tiny”—who had some vague aspirations of becoming a football player. It was he who grabbed me by the back of my neck one lovely spring morning and, holding me there, dropped a dime onto the sidewalk, ordering me to pick it up. When I did, he stomped on my hand, crushing two of my fingers, the nail on one of them to this day oddly distended toward the digit. (Despite hating his guts for that, fifteen or so years later, I would be saddened to hear that Tiny, while having had some success with a second-tier football team in Pennsylvania, died prematurely in his early thirties of cancer.)
The Irish were everywhere in the neighborhood in those days (at least down to 108th Street, below which the streets became more Puerto Rican), but so were Hispanics and what census polls would now call “Other.” Unlike some neighborhoods, like around the West Sixties, where different ethnic groups were at one another’s throats, waging block-to-block turf wars of the sort commemorated in B movies, the older kids around there seemed to get along. In earlier times, in fact the late 1950s, when I, still camped at home, could have hardly been aware of such things, there had been periods in which gangs like the Sinners and the Assassins occasionally ventured south from their uptown Harlem neighborhoods — north of City College — to stage “rumbles” against the local “whiteys.” These were fights born of grudges that began at high school dances with some insult, or a face-off between two tough guys getting out of hand, or because someone was banging someone else’s girl, or quite simply out of pure poverty-driven anger and, as well, at a time when the word spic was in common usage in New York City, from the deep memory of old, bred-in-the-bone resentments. I’m not quite sure where the Latinos or, for that matter, the other ethnicities in my neighborhood placed their loyalties, but I’m fairly sure that in such instances they joined their white counterparts in these face-offs against that common enemy.
Over those years, blacks had also made incursions onto our block from the east, gangs of them climbing up the terraces of Morningside Park, intending to swarm over the neighborhood, though without much success. Down in the park on 118th, there was a “circle,” a kind of stone embattlement that looked out over Harlem, and it is from there, I’ve been told, that the locals fended off such attacks by raining down bottles, rocks, and garbage cans on whoever tried to race up to the drive by a stone stairway or to climb those walls.
Nevertheless, though those days had passed, but not the prejudices, the possibility of such confrontations still hung in the air, and as a consequence, it was a common thing for the police to patrol Amsterdam Avenue regularly in their green and white squad cars, with an eye to breaking up any large groups gathered on a street corner, no matter what they were up to — usually just smoking cigarettes and bullshitting about girls. Still, the neighborhood definitely identified with that gang-era mythology. When a recording of the musical West Side Story first came out, my brother threw a party in our apartment for his friends, with my father, incidentally, stationed in the kitchen, allowing an endless supply of beer and other refreshments into the house, while in the living room, the lights turned low, couples danced to songs like “I Feel Pretty” and “Maria,” the record playing over and over again, along with other music — of the Shirelles and the Drifters — but repeating so often that, looking back now, I am sure there was a pride about it, as if, in a neighborhood where mixed couples were already as common as interethnic fights, its songs amounted to a kind of personal anthem for a lot of the older kids. (And to think that the musical itself had been put together by a group of theatrically brilliant middle-class Jewish folks, who, in all likelihood, had viewed such a world from a safe distance!)
Now, the first party I ever attended, at Halloween, took place in the basement apartment of my father’s pal Mr. Martinez, who lived up the street. His son, Danny, later a sergeant in the NYC police department, decorated the place with candlelit jack-o’-lanterns and tried to make their basement digs seem scarily festive, but what I mainly remember is that he provided a plain old American diversion, something I had only seen on TV, a bowl filled with apples for which one would bob, as well as a game of blindfolded pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, which I had never played before. (Thank you, Danny.) One of their upstairs neighbors was a Mexican woman, Mrs. Flores, who seemed terrified of allowing her little boy, dressed always so nicely and wearing white patent leather shoes, to mix with the other kids. (In his daintiness he seemed another version of my younger self, darker, but just as bewildered as I had once been.) There also happened to be another Latino kid from that block, a diabetic who, sharing my name, was called Little Oscar. Having apparently narrowly escaped diabetes myself, it amazed me to watch him sitting on his stoop as he, with resignation, administered himself a shot of insulin with a syringe. While it fascinated some of the kids, his condition did not bring out pity in them. Unfortunately, so frail and truly weightless, he, just skin and bones, seemed an easy victim to the bullies, and those kids, to my horror, were always picking on him — and cruelly; on at least on one occasion, as he stood with his hand tied behind him to a signpost, they tried to force him to take a bite from a dried piece of dog turd stuck on a twig. “Come on, leave the guy alone,” I remember saying, but they didn’t relent. (Whatever happened to Little Oscar, for his parents, catching wind of such things, soon got him the hell out of that neighborhood, I hope his future life went well, though I will never know.)
Slowly, in the years after my illness, I had made my own friends from around, among them Richard, the youngest smoker I would ever know. I can recall seeing him, a few months after I had returned from the hospital, standing outside my front window and showing off the snappy cowboy outfit and medallion-rimmed black hat that his father, often away, had just brought back from his travels. One of the few kids around who’d take the trouble to come visit me in the days when I couldn’t really leave the apartment, he’d sometimes climb the rickety back stairway to my window from the courtyard, crawling inside to play and scrambling out when my mother heard us from down the hall. The youngest of a large family, the Muller-Thyms, who occupied two bustling first-floor apartments, one next to the other, across the street, he had four brothers and five sisters (though I knew hardly any of the older ones at all). As families went, they were locally famous for both the brightness of the children and the slight eccentricities of their genius father, Bernard, who had a high sloping forehead and a vaguely Hubert Humphrey pinched-in cast to his face, though with a Dutchman’s side whiskers (the only thing missing would have been a meerschaum pipe).