sd gross
02-11-2011, 09:17 PM
:peepwall:
Rockaway Summer
by Stephen D. Gross
At 4:32 this morning I awoke to the beat of wind-driven surf and the thick, sweet scent of privet outside our bedroom window... also the living room and kitchen window.... which is how it is when your living space is one room. The sand blowing down the sleepy street and the seaweedy pungency of the damp air mingled with Eau de Boardwalk - a tantalizing blend of cherry cheese knishes, ski ball alleys, shreds of Tuckee Cup slimed with pork fried rice, whispered "Rockaway", where faded dreams sank slowly into the strand abreast the Atlantic. Still thirteen, I wandered a purgatory between childhood and teen world and hated it. Too small for the big guys to take seriously and too distracted by the raging pandemonium between my ears to commune the childish pissants my own age.
Turquoise seahorses swimming with coral mermaids encircled the mighty Wurlitzer, shimmering in sync with the pounding blue rhythms ‘n smoky blues. The salty air reacted, vibrating electrically, making ears itch and nerves tingle. A nickel a pop to play the box. Cheap tunes, but me unable to bring myself to use dad’s tip money for three minutes of Sunday Dreaming with the Harptones. I had learned early on that he was busting his butt waiting tables in a Garment District dairy restaurant and as much as I loved the doo-wops, I couldn't bring myself to feed the box.
David and Marty and the brother in the middle, I think his name was Norman, always had juke change. They had change for pizza and Ski Ball in the amusement arcades, and for Tales From the Crypt comics, and batteries for their portable radios. Their folks owned the once-proud manse long ago converted into a beach-community rooming house where lower middle-class Jews from the Bronx and Brooklyn could shell out two months’ salary so they could pass the sultry summers near, on, and under the Boardwalk.
The smoothly-geared juke box (what a great name - Juke Box!) splattered the porch with midway dazzle, effortlessly drowning out the creaking of the rocking chairs all lined up in a row, facing the street in which reposed elbow to elbow, the Oyster Brigade. Sharing grand tales of grandkids and Life-Threatening Operations, while the Oriental dragons and cyan seashells sinuously glowed off the chairs' slats and rockers creaking on past midnight. The Oysters slapping down their Mah Jongg tiles dreamed about young girls, who looked just like them, walking the narrow streets of ancient cities half a world away.
“Oy, Sarah, mine joints dey are killink me!” “Oy, oy, mine grandson Leonard vass not eggszepted from Clumbya medical school.” “You know Gertie’s husband Morris, he should live and be vell? (sotto voce) They found a lump!” “Chorus: “Oy, oy, oy gevalt!” Oy! OY! OY!!
Guess why I called them ‘Oysters’.
Meanwhile, back at the Wurlitzer, the El Dorados were waiting for that “Crazy little mamma come knock, knock, knockin’ at my back door” and never ever spoke of "Morris’ lump."
I had worries too, and they were much more serious than lumps - would Vinnie and Tony let me ride in their new Bonneville convertibles? Would Cynthia in the White Shorts from Beach 33rd Street who smelled from Noxema (I couldn't take my eyes off her!) be on the beach tomorrow? The rest of the world was worrying too - Vinnie and Tony worried that the color of their new Chinos wouldn't match the new designer colors which graced their sporty Pontiacs. Even Andy the Greek, who, it turns out, looked like Sylvester Stallone and was heir to Old Greek Money, worried. He lost sleep over his candy apple red Impala coming in dead last in the beachfront races every night. With annoying regularity, Far Rockaway Sid left them all staring up his Golden Hawk’s pipes, (if they could still see them through the fog). With each victory his ego swelled like the ‘Coney Island Whitefish’ the little kids inflated after finding them at the surfline at dawn; but Sid was secretly fearful that his fast, dependable Studebaker was managing to piss everyone off. Everybody managed to find something to rag about. It’s amazing we found any time to laugh.
I. myself, wasn’t feeling particularly joyful - just left out. The three oafish brothers had their little clique with their pal Freckled Kenny and Chink the Terror from Williamsburg. A Jewish guy with closely cropped butch-cut hair, lots of hard compact muscles, crafty, very narrow eyes, and a broad, flat nose. He was supposed to be tough and mean, (he came from a brutally competitive neighborhood) and his success with the girls was legendary among his peers, but he was one of the very few people that summer who treated me with any decency. I guess I was too non-threatening and inoffensive for him to consider intimidating me.
The odious pack spent the long, sultry evenings scrunched up near the Wurlitzer chortling and elbowing each other and making nasty cracks about the Oysters (and everyone else over nineteen years old), out of the sides of their mouths.
Sometimes Fat Beverly would take leave of her equally-corpulent mom and join them. Looking like a nightmare cabbage patch kid crammed into her rugby shirt with the bulging horizontal stripes, she would snap and crack and pop her gum and constantly poke at her greasy black hair, her nose, anything that was defenseless and unable to escape her plump, probing fingers. She and her mom had the flat next door to ours and I remember one lonely evening I was spending with the top forty on WINS-AM, aching for a taste of companionship, when there came a rhythmic knocking on the thin wall that Fat Beverly’s family and mine shared in common. I waited expectantly and listened and soon the tapping was repeated, like some kind of code. Elated by this seemingly cryptic message, by someone actually making contact, I happily knocked back.
I was excited over this furtive attempt at communication, this breech in my miserable solitude. Again came the syncopated thumping. A response! I was tasting the beginnings of social acceptance. So what if it was only Fat Bev? Maybe she couldn’t help that her legs looked like Popeye’s arms shoehorned into her lame toreador pants. I beat out a rhythmic response of my own. I hadn’t yet deciphered the code but what the hell, maybe she could figure out what I was saying anyway - mainly, ‘thanks for getting in touch...for giving me a tumble.’ Even if it was nothing more than some inflated, gum chewing, hog-hipped pork chop from Crown Heights tap, tap, tapping at my chamber wall.
Suddenly there was a sharp, insistent pounding on the door - not the wall, but the door. Allright! Actual contact. With a cheery, hospitable smile I wrenched the portal wide and there they stood. Like a pair of angry chorizo sausages, red faced, reeking from ciggie smoke and wheezing through flared, albeit reconstructed nostrils “What the hell am I doin’ knockin’ on their fuckin’ wall?,” the tank-like twins chorused. They weren’t really twins, but one was very clearly a reduced carbon copy of the other.
I felt like I’d been vortexed into a Ray Harryhausen (It was before David Lynch) movie and tossed into the cave of the Mutant Sow Queen and Her Cannibalistic Piglet Daughter. The way the veins in their necks pulsed you could dance to it and I could see the news was not good. Although my psyche has built walls around my recollections to spare me the pain of the details, the caustic juice of sharp remembrance seeps through nevertheless. They were either trying to dislodge a bagel they had crammed into their toaster or they were taking turns slaughtering roaches with a shared pair of Famolare pumps. Possibly, they were combining the above into one joyous event. Whatever their focus, compassion and love of (this) fellow man had nothing to do with it. With brain afire, my lips moved in an attempt to explain but nothing intelligible emerged from my mouth. Their wrath vented, the Sows from Hell soon headed back to their entomological carnage, leaving me to tap out on my pulsing temple, a few rhythms of my own.
As misplaced as I had been feeling, as subterranean as my self-esteem had been, the Fat Beverly episode managed to make matters worse. She and her porcine mom put the news out on the wire in seven languages, accompanying each telling with gales of guttural, gut rolling laughter. I’m not one to forgive or forget and I hope their lives have been spotted with a fair share of misery, loneliness and frustration. If our paths ever cross again, the only reason I’ll “turn the other cheek” is so I can offer them a better view of my ass. What happened a few days later was the capper, however, and my attitude toward man- and womankind has never been quite the same.
My folks, loving and thoughtful though they were, could do nothing to assuage my aching. They explained that it had nothing at all to do with the way I was, that there were just some errant genes floating around this planet and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Of course their compassion mattered a lot to me but they weren’t my peers and what I really needed was peer acceptance, a fraternal arm around my shoulders, a supportive word in my ear.
When the knock on the door came a few evenings later I naturally felt guarded and apprehensive. It was Kenny and the Middle Brother, Norman. Kenny Kimmelman had spent the entire summer working toward a merit badge in cruelty and nastiness. He was thin and tall, but had a round, fleshy face emblazoned with blotches that passed for freckles. He reeked from the cloud of Pall Mall exhalations that enshrouded him, and he had the ugliest mouth I've ever seen. Curled in a permanent sneer, his lips looked like greased worms. He had dirty, liver-colored curls that clung closely to his skull, and his eyes were like those of a pike, and very close together. I hope he's spent his life in a rank, roach-ridden cell on Riker’s Island with two or three four-hundred pounders named Bubba who have a sociopathic hatred for freckled, sallow-skinned red-heads. But my residual vehemence is driving me ahead of my self.
When Kenny and Norman announced themselves, sounding remorseful and apologetic, I should have known something was up. They’d heard about the Fat Bev fiasco and said from the far side of the door that they were really sorry about how miserably they had treated me all summer, and how, now that the season was ending, they wanted to apologize and tell me how terribly sorry they were. They sounded sincere enough and although I had painfully learned they were not to be trusted, I wanted so badly to be accepted, I decided to open the door. The two older guys stood there smiling - I should have seen the maliciousness in their eyes but I guess I just didn’t want to - nd repeating how really sorry they were. Smiling malignantly, Kenny stuck his hand out in friendship. Quietly thrilled, as I reached out to shake it, his left hand swung around from behind his back and he cracked a raw egg over my head. As the runny yolk and the albumen slid down my face and mixed with the tears that had begun to flow, all I could do was just stand motionless, looking after them in shocked disbelief as they ran cackling and howling into the darkness.
It has been many years now since that Rockaway summer. I’ve had the good fortune to come to know a few wonderful people, as well as an ungodly number of assholes. I still carry around a residual bitterness, a loathing and fear of loneliness, and more than my share of caution and cynicism. Additionally, I'm convinced all bullies go straight to Hell.
In my more ebon moods I envision Kimmelman and all three of the brothers alive and suffering in some degenerating inner-city slum, racked with hopelessness, their lives entirely lacking in love and caring. Sometimes I even dream about going back to New York, to visit relatives and see what’s become of the old Rockaway neighborhood. Sometimes I see myself running into the two bastards and thanking them for teaching me that before taking a person’s hand in friendship, it’s wise to take a good look at the other hand, just to see what it's holding.
:burningman:
Rockaway Summer
by Stephen D. Gross
At 4:32 this morning I awoke to the beat of wind-driven surf and the thick, sweet scent of privet outside our bedroom window... also the living room and kitchen window.... which is how it is when your living space is one room. The sand blowing down the sleepy street and the seaweedy pungency of the damp air mingled with Eau de Boardwalk - a tantalizing blend of cherry cheese knishes, ski ball alleys, shreds of Tuckee Cup slimed with pork fried rice, whispered "Rockaway", where faded dreams sank slowly into the strand abreast the Atlantic. Still thirteen, I wandered a purgatory between childhood and teen world and hated it. Too small for the big guys to take seriously and too distracted by the raging pandemonium between my ears to commune the childish pissants my own age.
Turquoise seahorses swimming with coral mermaids encircled the mighty Wurlitzer, shimmering in sync with the pounding blue rhythms ‘n smoky blues. The salty air reacted, vibrating electrically, making ears itch and nerves tingle. A nickel a pop to play the box. Cheap tunes, but me unable to bring myself to use dad’s tip money for three minutes of Sunday Dreaming with the Harptones. I had learned early on that he was busting his butt waiting tables in a Garment District dairy restaurant and as much as I loved the doo-wops, I couldn't bring myself to feed the box.
David and Marty and the brother in the middle, I think his name was Norman, always had juke change. They had change for pizza and Ski Ball in the amusement arcades, and for Tales From the Crypt comics, and batteries for their portable radios. Their folks owned the once-proud manse long ago converted into a beach-community rooming house where lower middle-class Jews from the Bronx and Brooklyn could shell out two months’ salary so they could pass the sultry summers near, on, and under the Boardwalk.
The smoothly-geared juke box (what a great name - Juke Box!) splattered the porch with midway dazzle, effortlessly drowning out the creaking of the rocking chairs all lined up in a row, facing the street in which reposed elbow to elbow, the Oyster Brigade. Sharing grand tales of grandkids and Life-Threatening Operations, while the Oriental dragons and cyan seashells sinuously glowed off the chairs' slats and rockers creaking on past midnight. The Oysters slapping down their Mah Jongg tiles dreamed about young girls, who looked just like them, walking the narrow streets of ancient cities half a world away.
“Oy, Sarah, mine joints dey are killink me!” “Oy, oy, mine grandson Leonard vass not eggszepted from Clumbya medical school.” “You know Gertie’s husband Morris, he should live and be vell? (sotto voce) They found a lump!” “Chorus: “Oy, oy, oy gevalt!” Oy! OY! OY!!
Guess why I called them ‘Oysters’.
Meanwhile, back at the Wurlitzer, the El Dorados were waiting for that “Crazy little mamma come knock, knock, knockin’ at my back door” and never ever spoke of "Morris’ lump."
I had worries too, and they were much more serious than lumps - would Vinnie and Tony let me ride in their new Bonneville convertibles? Would Cynthia in the White Shorts from Beach 33rd Street who smelled from Noxema (I couldn't take my eyes off her!) be on the beach tomorrow? The rest of the world was worrying too - Vinnie and Tony worried that the color of their new Chinos wouldn't match the new designer colors which graced their sporty Pontiacs. Even Andy the Greek, who, it turns out, looked like Sylvester Stallone and was heir to Old Greek Money, worried. He lost sleep over his candy apple red Impala coming in dead last in the beachfront races every night. With annoying regularity, Far Rockaway Sid left them all staring up his Golden Hawk’s pipes, (if they could still see them through the fog). With each victory his ego swelled like the ‘Coney Island Whitefish’ the little kids inflated after finding them at the surfline at dawn; but Sid was secretly fearful that his fast, dependable Studebaker was managing to piss everyone off. Everybody managed to find something to rag about. It’s amazing we found any time to laugh.
I. myself, wasn’t feeling particularly joyful - just left out. The three oafish brothers had their little clique with their pal Freckled Kenny and Chink the Terror from Williamsburg. A Jewish guy with closely cropped butch-cut hair, lots of hard compact muscles, crafty, very narrow eyes, and a broad, flat nose. He was supposed to be tough and mean, (he came from a brutally competitive neighborhood) and his success with the girls was legendary among his peers, but he was one of the very few people that summer who treated me with any decency. I guess I was too non-threatening and inoffensive for him to consider intimidating me.
The odious pack spent the long, sultry evenings scrunched up near the Wurlitzer chortling and elbowing each other and making nasty cracks about the Oysters (and everyone else over nineteen years old), out of the sides of their mouths.
Sometimes Fat Beverly would take leave of her equally-corpulent mom and join them. Looking like a nightmare cabbage patch kid crammed into her rugby shirt with the bulging horizontal stripes, she would snap and crack and pop her gum and constantly poke at her greasy black hair, her nose, anything that was defenseless and unable to escape her plump, probing fingers. She and her mom had the flat next door to ours and I remember one lonely evening I was spending with the top forty on WINS-AM, aching for a taste of companionship, when there came a rhythmic knocking on the thin wall that Fat Beverly’s family and mine shared in common. I waited expectantly and listened and soon the tapping was repeated, like some kind of code. Elated by this seemingly cryptic message, by someone actually making contact, I happily knocked back.
I was excited over this furtive attempt at communication, this breech in my miserable solitude. Again came the syncopated thumping. A response! I was tasting the beginnings of social acceptance. So what if it was only Fat Bev? Maybe she couldn’t help that her legs looked like Popeye’s arms shoehorned into her lame toreador pants. I beat out a rhythmic response of my own. I hadn’t yet deciphered the code but what the hell, maybe she could figure out what I was saying anyway - mainly, ‘thanks for getting in touch...for giving me a tumble.’ Even if it was nothing more than some inflated, gum chewing, hog-hipped pork chop from Crown Heights tap, tap, tapping at my chamber wall.
Suddenly there was a sharp, insistent pounding on the door - not the wall, but the door. Allright! Actual contact. With a cheery, hospitable smile I wrenched the portal wide and there they stood. Like a pair of angry chorizo sausages, red faced, reeking from ciggie smoke and wheezing through flared, albeit reconstructed nostrils “What the hell am I doin’ knockin’ on their fuckin’ wall?,” the tank-like twins chorused. They weren’t really twins, but one was very clearly a reduced carbon copy of the other.
I felt like I’d been vortexed into a Ray Harryhausen (It was before David Lynch) movie and tossed into the cave of the Mutant Sow Queen and Her Cannibalistic Piglet Daughter. The way the veins in their necks pulsed you could dance to it and I could see the news was not good. Although my psyche has built walls around my recollections to spare me the pain of the details, the caustic juice of sharp remembrance seeps through nevertheless. They were either trying to dislodge a bagel they had crammed into their toaster or they were taking turns slaughtering roaches with a shared pair of Famolare pumps. Possibly, they were combining the above into one joyous event. Whatever their focus, compassion and love of (this) fellow man had nothing to do with it. With brain afire, my lips moved in an attempt to explain but nothing intelligible emerged from my mouth. Their wrath vented, the Sows from Hell soon headed back to their entomological carnage, leaving me to tap out on my pulsing temple, a few rhythms of my own.
As misplaced as I had been feeling, as subterranean as my self-esteem had been, the Fat Beverly episode managed to make matters worse. She and her porcine mom put the news out on the wire in seven languages, accompanying each telling with gales of guttural, gut rolling laughter. I’m not one to forgive or forget and I hope their lives have been spotted with a fair share of misery, loneliness and frustration. If our paths ever cross again, the only reason I’ll “turn the other cheek” is so I can offer them a better view of my ass. What happened a few days later was the capper, however, and my attitude toward man- and womankind has never been quite the same.
My folks, loving and thoughtful though they were, could do nothing to assuage my aching. They explained that it had nothing at all to do with the way I was, that there were just some errant genes floating around this planet and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Of course their compassion mattered a lot to me but they weren’t my peers and what I really needed was peer acceptance, a fraternal arm around my shoulders, a supportive word in my ear.
When the knock on the door came a few evenings later I naturally felt guarded and apprehensive. It was Kenny and the Middle Brother, Norman. Kenny Kimmelman had spent the entire summer working toward a merit badge in cruelty and nastiness. He was thin and tall, but had a round, fleshy face emblazoned with blotches that passed for freckles. He reeked from the cloud of Pall Mall exhalations that enshrouded him, and he had the ugliest mouth I've ever seen. Curled in a permanent sneer, his lips looked like greased worms. He had dirty, liver-colored curls that clung closely to his skull, and his eyes were like those of a pike, and very close together. I hope he's spent his life in a rank, roach-ridden cell on Riker’s Island with two or three four-hundred pounders named Bubba who have a sociopathic hatred for freckled, sallow-skinned red-heads. But my residual vehemence is driving me ahead of my self.
When Kenny and Norman announced themselves, sounding remorseful and apologetic, I should have known something was up. They’d heard about the Fat Bev fiasco and said from the far side of the door that they were really sorry about how miserably they had treated me all summer, and how, now that the season was ending, they wanted to apologize and tell me how terribly sorry they were. They sounded sincere enough and although I had painfully learned they were not to be trusted, I wanted so badly to be accepted, I decided to open the door. The two older guys stood there smiling - I should have seen the maliciousness in their eyes but I guess I just didn’t want to - nd repeating how really sorry they were. Smiling malignantly, Kenny stuck his hand out in friendship. Quietly thrilled, as I reached out to shake it, his left hand swung around from behind his back and he cracked a raw egg over my head. As the runny yolk and the albumen slid down my face and mixed with the tears that had begun to flow, all I could do was just stand motionless, looking after them in shocked disbelief as they ran cackling and howling into the darkness.
It has been many years now since that Rockaway summer. I’ve had the good fortune to come to know a few wonderful people, as well as an ungodly number of assholes. I still carry around a residual bitterness, a loathing and fear of loneliness, and more than my share of caution and cynicism. Additionally, I'm convinced all bullies go straight to Hell.
In my more ebon moods I envision Kimmelman and all three of the brothers alive and suffering in some degenerating inner-city slum, racked with hopelessness, their lives entirely lacking in love and caring. Sometimes I even dream about going back to New York, to visit relatives and see what’s become of the old Rockaway neighborhood. Sometimes I see myself running into the two bastards and thanking them for teaching me that before taking a person’s hand in friendship, it’s wise to take a good look at the other hand, just to see what it's holding.
:burningman: