And those were the nice ones who yelled at me.
In the mid-fifties, there was a fad for young boys who
played on the streets of Brooklyn. In those days, there were plenty of produce
stores with empty wooden crates stacked somewhere where you could steal one.
Being poor, we took what we could and improvised.
You took an empty crate and mounted it on a 2”X 4” or even a
4” X 4” board and then got an old pair of roller skates dismembering them and
mounted the wheels on the front and back of the board.
This was our form of getting around, since it didn’t pay to
own a bicycle with all the traffic and concrete that existed, plus the
temptation of someone stealing your bike if you left it alone for a minute.
This was the poor kids bike.
If you grew up in Brooklyn or the Bronx or even Queens, you
heard the grating sound of roller skate wheels as they rolled by. It wasn’t a
pleasant sound, and if you passed the same people enough times, they would
respond some how.
On my grandmother’s street was a club for Italian men,
called the Republican Club, and they played pinnacle all day long, drank coffee
from demitasse cups drank shots of whiskey and smoked these old rope like
stinky cigars called “DeNapoli”.
Dad was a great father in many ways. When he couldn’t afford
to buy me something, he would look for an alternative instead of saying: “Sorry
kid.” Since I didn’t have a bike that he could afford, and the fad on the
streets was a wooden scooter, Dad built me one. I never in my life asked him
for anything, knowing we were poor, and with the exception of Christmas, never
verbalized what I wish I had, knowing with 3 other kids he just wasn’t going to
afford it.
On Saturdays, during the spring and summer, I would go over
to my grandmother’s house and in the front was a store, a novelty kind of gift
shop that Dad owned and ran. I would go with him and keep him company and amuse
myself when I could. Dad kept the scooter at my grandmother’s house in the
basement so that I had it when I got there. There was no room in our 3-story
apartment house, so grandma it was.
I would mount bottle caps or decals or paint things on the
box and scoot up and down the street sidewalk. In front of the Republican Club
sat some old geezers that sat on the sidewalk and chatted with each other. The
first time I would go by, they would stare me down, the second time they would
pull out their cigars and yell: “Get the hell outta here, you little a bastard!”
or “Basta, Madonna me!”
If I were bold enough to try a third time, they would yell:
“A ma bafongul!” a nice way of
saying: “Kid, you coma by a one more-a time, I’m a gonna killa you, or tella
you fatter!” Me personally would opt for death, because my “Fatter”, he no-a
like a to hear that I was uh facema!
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