One of These Things First Read online

  I could spend weeks without leaving the block I lived on. Eighteenth Avenue was my world, complete as far as I was concerned. I knew every one of the 182 concrete squares on our sidewalk. There, where I fell and cracked my head open trying to learn to ride a two-wheeler. There, where before I was born, a dog had stepped into the wet cement and left four perfect paw impressions, a canine fingerprint. And over there, where Uncle Saul hoisted me in his arms when I was four years old to see the silver spaceship float across the sky, or at the curb opposite the store, where an indomitable clump of weeds grew from a crevice of black dirt, my only flora, for there were no trees on this block in Brooklyn.

  Our block was the Borough Park bus and truck company of Grover’s Corners, with our own characters and plot twists. Would Mr. Fleischman, a haughty German Jew who wore a pocket handkerchief and owned the gown shop down the block, have a second heart attack? Would Old Man McGlynn drink himself to death in his dark saloon, McGlynn’s Inn, where he and other scary men sat in shadows, hunched over the bar all day? Would Sima, the lovely young woman with hearing aids who lived above Klenetsky’s kosher butcher and made papier-mâché marionettes for the neighborhood children, ever get past her deafness and find love and have children of her own? Did jolly Mr. Silverstein, of Silverstein’s Fine Delicatessen, with the best stuffed breast of veal in all of Brooklyn, know his son, who lived in Los Angeles, was a pornographer? Was it true that the window display of Schecter’s Smock Shop hadn’t changed in fifteen years, and no one had noticed?

  Did the disabled vet who owned the candy store with a rack of comic books have a funny walk because he lost his testicles during the war? And what secrets did Nate Berkowitz have, whose hand once brushed against Katherine’s leg, she claimed, sitting next to him at the Culver Luncheonette? Every day Berkowitz stood just inside the front door of his linoleum-and-carpet store, chain-smoking Tareytons, a horse-track betting sheet stuck in his back pocket, a fedora hiding his yarmulke so as not to put off goyim customers.

  Who was the mentally handicapped man who appeared on the corner near the stairs to the elevated line every afternoon at five o’clock, and sang in a high falsetto to the tune of “La donna è mobile,” My name is Hen-er-ry, I live in Coney Island, put me on the D train, the money’s in my pocket? What about the man who was waiting for a train at the 18th Avenue stop of the elevated line and had to take a pee, and when he peed on the third rail the electricity ran up his urine and electrocuted him through his penis?

  And what about the Culver Theater?

  Well, it was glorious, and it was mine. It was cavernous, nearly fifteen hundred seats, an ornate relic of the 1920s. It had a dramatic ceiling mural of figures in white gauzy gowns in a sort of daisy chain, and every form of seraphim and cherubim that the imagination could summon was pictured holding up the faux columns along the walls. The theater was also equipped with a Wurlitzer 2 manual, 7 rank organ so powerful it could vibrate the seats and make sound effects like horses’ hooves and a steamboat whistle to accompany silent films, but it was long ago turned off. Also long gone was a Chinese garden and outdoor screening area, where in the summer you could watch movies and sip lemonade under the Brooklyn moon. When I was a child they hung a white satin “Air Cooled” banner with blue fringe from the marquee in the summer, and if you stood by the theater when the lobby doors swung open for a half a second you were enveloped by a blast of

  popcorn-scented Freon.

  By the 1950s the Culver hadn’t screened a first-run movie in twenty years. It sometimes took months for a picture that opened in Manhattan to trickle down to us. A big hit, like King Kong, could take a year. The theater stayed alive with a kids’ double feature every Saturday at noon along with twenty-five cartoons that often drew a thousand rowdy neighborhood kids. My mom and dad and I went to the Friday night promotions when the new movies were put in and collected pieces of the free eight-piece place setting in a modern pattern. Over the years we assembled hundreds of pieces of mismatched cheap china from which we ate.

  My grandmother was chums with Murray-the-manager. Muna—I called her that instead of “grandma”—gave Murray’s wife free hosiery—the wife had diabetes—and somehow Murray rigged it so that at one Saturday afternoon matinee I won a Schwinn two-wheel bicycle in a raffle promotion the theater was holding. Murray also let me in without paying, whenever I wanted. During the week in the afternoon the theater was almost always empty, and I had the place to myself. I went to the movies like other kids turned on the TV set. Oh the places I went, the people I met, the things I saw from the fifth row on the left aisle, where my mother made me sit so she could always find me, and pressed fifty cents into the hands of one of the tough matrons to keep me safe.

  Cheek by jowl with the Culver Theater was the IND elevated line, which made its presence known in the theater with a rumble every ten minutes or so, the trains thundering by only twenty feet from the theater wall. The El, which dissected 18th Avenue at the corner, blocked our afternoon sun and kept McDonald Avenue directly below it in shadows. It was a rudimentary two-story structure of beams and braces, like a child’s Erector Set, caked with city grime and held together with rivets the size of a man’s fist. The station platform was completely open, no fences or walls, and I loved going up there, the trains blowing my hair as they blasted by, the Culver Theater’s big wraparound marquee of a hundred clear lightbulbs just beyond my reach. It was like a crane shot in a movie where the camera pulls back, revealing an Edward Hopper tableau come to life. I stood on the station platform transfixed for hours watching our little drama unfold below, the people going about their business, the big store in the middle of the block with the pink neon Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear sign, the salesgirls and customers and shopkeepers, my father’s frightening rages, the tragic secret of my perversion, my grandfather’s shameful affairs, all this marked in quarter tones by the roar of the passing trains.

  Lawnmower Boy

  Funny thing was, although the D train right on the corner connected us easily with Manhattan, we went there only for special occasions, like going to see a Broadway show for a birthday or to eat at a famous restaurant like Mama Leone’s or Luchow’s. Otherwise Brooklyn had everything we needed or wanted, all of it happily lacking in the complications of “the city.” They called Brooklyn “Manhattan’s bedroom,” because so many of the people who worked there during the day went home to Brooklyn on the train at night. So Brooklyn wasn’t exactly provincial, but I’d guess that most people in Borough Park in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up, didn’t know much about, say, international diplomacy, or fine wines, or haute couture. Or psychiatry. Or homosexuals.

  Well, there was one homo I knew, to use the lingua franca of Brooklyn in the 1950s. He was a freak, nature’s mistake, like in a science fiction movie where a man melds with a woman, a creature that didn’t deserve to live. It terrified me just to be in his presence. He rented the basement apartment at Aunt Gertie’s house on Avenue F, and sometimes at big family dinners he helped serve and clean up for five dollars and I got to look at him, but I avoided making eye contact. I figured he knew about me. All nature’s mistakes recognize each other. Michelle, as they called him—he let them call him that (his name was Michael but he seemed to think it was okay to call him Michelle)—had manicured nails and plucked eyebrows and he walked like a girl. Once he said he watched wrestling on TV when he folded the laundry, and my father called him a fairy and a homo behind his back. And there was one other homo I heard of, Christine Jorgensen. My parents and Big Rich and Tina were joking about it one night, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in Tina’s kitchen. They said that Christine Jorgensen was a homo who went to Sweden and had his dick and balls cut off.

  I didn’t want to have my dick and balls cut off. So I kept it a secret that I was a homo as best I could, and I watched how other boys moved and walked and talked, and I tried to look and be like them. But I guess it was already showing, after what Arnie and Irvin
g said a month before I tried to kill myself.

  Arnie and Irv, I had known them my whole life. They were okay guys, I looked up to them. They owned the Culver Luncheonette, nestled into the side of the Culver Theater, and I was in there every day. We all were. The whole neighborhood was in and out of that place all day. It was just five doors down from the store, and the salesgirls went there for coffee and an English muffin. The soda fountain had large plate glass windows facing the street, and everybody sitting on one of the twelve stools at the long counter could watch what was happening on street, like watching a movie on a Cinemascope screen. I must have eaten a million cheeseburgers sitting at the counter, absently staring out the big window at the world going by, while my grandmother Rose had her afternoon English and coffee, and kibitzed with Arnie and Irv and the other customers.

  The whole neighborhood knew Rose, who owned the bra and girdle shop. She was a neighborhood luminary. She was barely five feet tall, honey blond, with hair teased like cotton candy sprayed with shellac. Her jokes were corny, but she kept them coming. She had her following too. Customers dropped into the store just to say hello. She always had some cheering advice, usually, “This too shall pass,” and a few stories. She could be touchingly sweet, even as she told dirty jokes. Every day she wore the same immaculate outfit—a blouse, a skirt, white nurse’s shoes, and a freshly pressed, spotless smock with a folded, clean handkerchief in her pocket she often used to dry my tears.

  One afternoon at the Culver Luncheonette I was sitting with her at the counter, savoring an onion bialy with butter and tangy American cheese, along with a tall glass of ice-cold chocolate milk made from U-Bet syrup. It was so good I absently whistled. Twice.

  Arnie, balding, doughy, in an apron behind the counter, called to his partner, “Hey, Irving! What whistles besides birds and fairies?”

  So I took a big sip of chocolate milk, one time, two times, as if I didn’t hear what was just said, and I pretended that sipping the delicious, cold, thick chocolate milk was all that mattered in the world. It was a stupid joke because people whistle, birds chirp and sing, and who knows what fairies do? But I got the point. They just said it, out of the clear blue, with immunity. I guess you have to hate a child to say something like that. I dared not look at Arnie and Irving because acknowledging them with even a glance would make me complicit in their taunt, but I couldn’t stop myself, and when I peeked they were both snickering.

  My grandmother got very quiet. She looked deeply aggravated. I knew she would have stuck up for me except that calling attention to it would probably only make it worse. Anyway, she wasn’t much for confrontation. So we stared straight ahead out the window, one bite, two bites, and then Muna frostily asked for a check. At the cash register she raised herself to her full five feet and said to Irv, “I’ll never come back here again. Never.”

  But she started going back in a week. You couldn’t blame her; it was the only place to get an English.

  From then on, every time I walked past the big glass windows of the Culver Luncheonette, Arnie and Irving minced around inside and curtsied to me like a girl. I prayed they would get tired of it, but it continued to amuse them. I considered telling my father, but I was too ashamed. What could I say—they tease me for being a homo? And then what would he do? Storm the ramparts of the luncheonette to complain that his son was being mocked for being a fegele? I had to stop walking past the luncheonette altogether. I began to cross to the other side of the street, and I walked with my face turned away, toward the wall. Even when I went to the Culver Theater, which was right next door to the luncheonette, I walked all the way around the block to get there.

  If Arnie and Irving could tell, I suppose everybody knew. I promised myself that I would make it untrue. I promised myself that I would not let myself think homo thoughts, yet I could think of nothing else. I was haywire with hormones. I spent most of the time walking around in a semi-hunch, trying to hide an erection that wouldn’t subside, desperate to find a place to jerk off, mind-wrestling to keep my thoughts away from rubbing my chest against the chest of another boy, which was as far as my stifled sexual expression had progressed. “Chest to chest,” I thought of it. “Let’s go chest to chest,” I would whisper to the lawnmower boy as we embraced and melted.

  The lawnmower boy was a deity in whom I invested all my yearnings. I glimpsed him one Sunday out of the car window from behind the Franconia Notch decal, as my father was driving us randomly around the Five Towns, Long Island’s repository of new-money, second-generation Jews in the 1960s. We spent many weekends gawking at the spoils of postwar, split-level prosperity on Long Island and became connoisseurs of model homes. We strolled through scores of them over the years, oohing and aahing over fireplaces and in-wall ovens, debating the virtues and deficits of the layouts and landscaping, then got back in the car, sighed, and drove off to another house we would never be able to afford.

  My dad was proud to have his master’s in education from New York University and to be a tenured teacher and guidance counselor with the New York City Board of Education, but teachers made lousy money back then, and even though he held down a second job teaching at night school in Manhattan, we were always scrimping to get by. One year my mother stuffed envelopes for a mail-order business for two cents each so we could pay installments on our living room furniture. My dad knew he’d never be able to buy us one of those houses in Hewlett Bay Harbor, or Lawrence, or a house like my grandfather, Gog, had in Freeport, with its two-car garage and celebrity bandleader who lived next door. Still, we dreamed and drove.

  The Lawnmower Boy was mowing the lawn of a house in a development in Lynbrook. I saw him fleetingly, no more than a slow camera pan as he passed in and out of frame, but I knew him so intimately from that moment that I can still smell the sun on the nape of his neck. He was bare-chested, his white tee shirt hanging out of the back pocket of his blue jeans, and his black high-top sneakers were unlaced. He was a real boy, not a fake boy like me, and everything about him was normal—the peach fuzz above his upper lip, eyebrows bleached blond from the sun, brown nipples the size of dimes, an electrifying trail of dark hair that began at his navel and disappeared into the elastic band of his Fruit of the Loom underwear. Chest to chest with me.

  He was with me every day after that, the ectoplasm of my desire. I called him Nathaniel when we talked, but in my mind, like God, he had no name. When I didn’t pay attention to him, he jealously intruded into my thoughts and made me hard. He was a show-off. Mischievous and endlessly entertaining. I masturbated thinking about going chest to chest with him half a dozen times a day, and every time I finished I was so filled with remorse and shame that I would beat my head with my fists until there were red bumps across my forehead. I would swear to Adonai that I would banish him, but I didn’t know how to make him go away, and anyway, I really didn’t want him to.

  Rifka

  The only person crazier than me that I knew growing up was my grandfather’s older sister, Aunt Rifka.

  Rifka was a big-boned woman with a hook nose and bosoms that swayed in her full slip like cannonballs in a sling. She was a gentle soul, guileless and loving. Her silver hair was tied into a messy braid that she wound up and pinned at the back of her head, like a charwoman. The great joy of her life was her sixteen-year-old, titian-haired daughter, Becky, a teenage piano prodigy who made her public debut at Carnegie Hall as part of a roster of talented student musicians from the five boroughs. She played Rifka’s favorite that afternoon, Beethoven’s haunting Für Elise. Three weeks later Becky’s joints turned black-and-blue. Leukemia. It was 1944 and they didn’t know how to treat it. In a month she was dead. That fast. Rifka, unable to process what had happened, fell apart. Almost overnight her eyes sank deep into her face, the sockets outlining her skull, and she entered an alternate reality in which Becky was alive. When Rifka returned home from the cemetery, she set a place at the big dining room table for her, and served a plate of food t
o the empty chair.

  Her family indulged her changing Becky’s sheets and calling Becky’s alarmed piano teacher to resume Becky’s lessons, but when Rifka began to hold conversations—and sometimes argue—with Becky, they committed her to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, a Five Boroughs version of Bedlam. At Creedmoor they gave Rifka a course of shock treatments, and then another course, and then a third, and when she came home she was so fried she hardly remembered anything at all, let alone Becky. She absentmindedly began to dress in a full slip and kitchen apron, with flesh-colored support hose that wrinkled at her ankles like folds of skin, her thin legs swallowed up by her huge black shoes.

  Rifka and her husband Shmuel, an immigrant housepainter she met at a July 4th parade in Prospect Park, already had hard luck with their first child—the lumbering giant Seymour, who was born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, as well as undescended testicles. Doctors removed the extra digits on his hands, but they left the extra toes on his feet so he would have better balance when he walked, causing him to wear giant shoes that looked like racquetball paddles. His testicles were surgically lowered into his empty ball sac, but I didn’t even want to think about that.

  Poor cousin Seymour was also “slow,” as everyone delicately put it, a little impaired, or maybe just stupid, but he was also irascible, lazy, and eager for his rich Uncle Harry, my grandfather, to drop dead, because Seymour assumed he would be left a great deal of money. Seymour referred to my grandfather’s death as “when my ship comes in.”