Brooklyn State Hospital

Most households had multiple children and not much square feet, so we were encouraged to be outside a lot. "Children should be seen and not heard," goes the expression, although the "should be seen" part did not seem heart-felt with most families I knew.

So you were shooed outside early in the day. It was okay because there were plenty of kids to play with, and adults to bother.

One slight complicating factor was Brooklyn State Hospital, home to a large and special population you couldn't play with and shouldn't, as a good person, bother.

Brooklyn State was a mental hospital, with many, many residents.

The hospital stretched long blocks north to south, and ten blocks east to west. Our side, east, was the only one with stores. So we had lots of visitors from the hospital, at all times.

The cautionary catechism from parents to kids was that "they" were like children, harmless, and wouldn't bother you if you didn't bother them.

We did find them to be harmless, though this made them unlike children, in our experience.

Good kids did not need to be warned about bothering them, and bad kids had the idea that it was bad luck to pick on on people "like that," so there was no trouble, or not much.

We didn't really speak of them much, prevalent as they were, and what you might call occasionally obvious. Bad luck or not, such mention was considered rude.

Of course, we were not always so genteel, and the words "retards" and "nuts" were used freely.

But we felt bad for them, because they caught a bad break; and the common wisdom seemed to be that hospitalization made the bad break worse, rather than helping.

There was sometimes shouting on the street, for no good reason, by a person to himself. But to be fair, this was not restricted to hospital residents, in Brooklyn 3. At least, we thought, the guys in green pants and laceless shoes had an excuse. More than one.

Reading Billboards For Dimes

"Even Y.A. Tittle isn't afraid to tackle a book," went a ditty on a TV ad for reading.

I knew early, through my own precocity in it, that reading could be profitable as well as fun. My parents took a quiet pride in it, but my uncles - my father's 6 brothers - were willing to pay to see me do it.

They seemed to regard it as freakish, or a trick. Their entreaties were like challenges.

I remember reading aloud a lot of newspaper stories about Berlin, Khrushchev, bombs, and space, with uncles over my shoulder. I got dimes and quarters for it. (I was discouraged (by my mother) from reading about Kitty Genovese, though I did. Despite her disapproval, Mother acquiesced enough to define for me the term "cocktail waitress.")

I earned money in cars reading billboards for these guys. "What does that one say?...Alright, how about that one?" As if I didn't really know what I was doing, but had somehow memorized every printed word in our house, but on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they would trip me up.

The one uncle who just seemed to enjoy the spectacle was Jimmy. Uncle Jimmy was kind of a sport - not married, a bit of a black sheep. He had a kind of natural exuberance, which included swearing, which no one else in the family did, at least not much.

Jimmy had the aspect of a compulsive gambler in this enterprise. I remember riding in a car with him, Uncle Robbie (the second oldest brother; quiet, a cop) and my father. We had gone through all the reading material around and about, so Jimmy started pulling things out of his pockets.

"What does this say?"

"Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco."

"Holy shit!"

"Hey," said my father.

"How about this?"

"Close Cover Before Striking."

"Holy shit!"

"Hey, I said."

"Sorry. But this kid is either a genius or psychosomatic or something." I might have gotten my hair tousled at this point.

Silence for a while. Then all of a sudden taciturn Uncle Robbie pipes up. He sees something he recognizes. "Stephen," he said from the front seat.

"Yes?"

"What do the words say on that building?"

I looked around, but before I could see it, Uncle Jimmy, sitting next to me, grabbed me and turned my head away.

"Hey, what are you, kidding? Don't make him look at that."

Robbie smirked. I was confused.

"What is it?," I asked.

"Prison," Jimmy said, in a whisper. We were on Atlantic Avenue. The words in question were probably House of Detention. Something like that.

"What's wrong with reading 'prison'?," I said.

"You should never even look at a prison," he said.

He drew in close.

" 'Peepings might be catchings.' You ever hear that saying?"

"No," I said.

"Well, remember it," he said with the air of a mentor. "The next time you might find yourself on the inside. If you want to look at it so bad. You know what I mean?"

Remarkably, maybe, I did. And I realized that reading was getting me into the world of grown-ups pretty quickly. I was getting pretty privy to their thinking. Also, their dimes.