Isn't It Great?

c

Working Life

Brooklyn 3 was a neighborhood of working people and there wasn't anyone who didn't work. You could see all the people without jobs you wanted walking around from the mental hospital and if that didn't encourage you to go to work and be grateful, nothing would.

Everyone knew where everyone worked. On our street, 878 Clarkson owned a produce business. 880 was us and our father ran a print shop at Pan American. 882 was shipping and receiving. 884 worked for the phone company; 886 at the Navy Yard; 888 were two secretaries; 890 worked in cargo at Idlewild airport; 892 was a cop.

888 was a household of two sisters, their two adolescent children, and the women's father. The sisters worked as secretaries in the city. Their father was retired and minded the house. This was an unorthodox lineup, but driven by necessity, and we all knew what that was.

We were particularly proud of our father because he worked in the city, for a big company everyone knew, in an office. He was the only guy on the block who wore a tie to work, unless you count the cop.

In those days Pan Am's offices were in Long Island City. In 1963, they moved to Manhattan, a gigantic building with their name on top. It meant prestige although to my father I think it meant most notably a shorter commute.

When he came home at night we kids would shout and run to the door and ride his legs and feet around. My mother never got the opportunity for that kind of greeting which of course is emblematic of the kind of deal women got. The men might have complained about work but you did not hear of them offering to trade places.

Pre-School Resistance

The streets of the neighborhood were full of activity but you could also be isolated, if you wanted. There was enough going on that no one really cared what you were doing, or if you existed, with the possible exception of your loved ones, with whom you could check in a couple of times a day, to keep them satisfied, and get something to eat.

There was not much greenery around, but there was enough dirt to meet a kid's desire to dig and bury. When it rained, water ran through the gutters, and you could float sticks.

Streets and schoolyards were for games, and alleys for skulking, or sitting or walking alone.

When it came time for my first remove from this world - for kindergarten -I balked.

I knew a bit about kindergarten. P.S. 268, on the corner, ran a summer program every year, which introduced me to the building and activities.

Outside, in the schoolyard, was fine. There was stickball, sprinklers, and running around.

The cafeteria was good, too. Cartons of milk and juice, nok-hockey and other games.

But deep inside was different. Hallways were dim and echoey quiet. Doors were forbidding and heavy, with glass up too high. There were flags and mottoes on the walls. It smelled like glue.

Sneaking around, I got a load of the kindergarten space.

This laboratory of learning consisted primarily of cheap-looking toys (not real toys; educational toys), books (not real books; picture books), and musical instruments, or sort-of musical instruments, like triangles and tom-toms.

I saw pictures of past classes. They didn't look too smart. Well, the girls looked all right; but the boys wore these little ties, or had their shirts buttoned all the way to the top.

I thought, did they get that way here? Or come in like that?

Probably both. But I wasn't taking any chances.

I talked to my parents about not going.

I don't see the point, I said. I already know how to read; I'm ahead of schedule. You don't see anybody else who knows how to read hanging around kindergarteners. They're going to have me looking at snap-together cards with big letters on them.

They'll teach you other things there, my parents said.

They won't, I said. I've been asking around. There's no subjects, no lessons, no homework. You sing songs, clap hands, and take naps. I could be here reading and doing things.

But all the other kids will be there, my parents said.

Exactly, I said. I'll have the neighborhood to myself.

I don't know if their reaction was more exasperation or resignment. But they granted my request. I never went.

I don't know if it was legal. Probably not, because it made good sense for someone.

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.

The Emergence of Words

I don't really remember a time when I couldn't read - only when I couldn't read so well, though that barely lasted past age 3.

I wasn't prodigious on all fronts. I didn't speak until age 2, except for two words: "Popeye" and "cookie."

It was a meager vocabulary, I guess; or perhaps a select one. The problem with learning more words than you personally need is that then people expect things of you, like responses. Why not put that off as long as possible, is possibly an advanced way to think.

So I always got to see Popeye on TV, with cookie(s), and everything else was somebody else's problem, at least for a while.

Of course, concerns of idiocy arose, but there again: someone else's problem.

At any rate, those concerns evaporated when I began to speak, in complete sentences, and apparently in rather an adult style. Then there was a concern about what gives with this kid, or more accurately what doesn't give, like hints of normal development before achievement.

That concern intensified with reading.

I don't remember any kid's books around our house. But we had the Daily News, which my father read every night, and I would look at with him. I remember seeing certain words a lot - Kennedy, Capitol, Yankee, Yogi - and getting the idea of how to write down what you say.

When I turned 3, or actually slightly before, there was a massive flood of words in the house, and my head, when my older brother Eddie started school.

He brought home books. I guess because he looked at them all day he didn't care about them at home. I looked at them every afternoon.

It was fascinating to me that they had stories that stayed the same. The newspaper changed every day. But readers, as they were called, had dozens of stories, with numbers on the pages. With the numbers, you could go back to where you were before, and try to figure out the words and story.

So this was my hobby in our sunny autumn bedroom every day. Somehow the words came readily, so to speak.

One day I had trouble with a word. It looked like it meant a piece of furniture, but that didn't make sense. No way I looked at it made sense.

Outside, my mother was hanging clothes in the yard. I stuck my head out the window. "Hey, Mom?"

She turned from the clothesline and looked at me. "Yes?"

"What does c-o-u-n-t-r-y spell?"

She was silent, with a strange look on her face.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"Because I'm reading this book and it says something about 'a city mouse and a c-o-u-n-t-r-y mouse'."

"It spells 'country'."

"Oh - yeah! A city mouse and a country mouse. That makes sense! Thank you."

In a minute, I had company. My mother came in from her work and asked me to read her the book. I showed her a couple of stories I liked. I got a lot of questions that had more to do with reading than with the stories.

She got a look on her face that seemed both happy and sad. It was a look I would come to know well, yet puzzle about, too.

Goyish Supermarket

Once a week, on Saturdays, we went to a supermarket. I say we because my mother didn't drive, so my father had to go, and they couldn't leave us kids home alone, so we all went.

The supermarket, King Kullen, was a mile away in distance; miles away otherwise. It wasn't fancy. But it had chicken in packaging, not on hooks. It had bread on Passover. It had a parking lot.

They spoke English there, presumably, although no one ever talked to you. At any rate, they didn't speak Yiddish.

You couldn't tell who owned it. They had a symbol of a cartoon character King Kullen who looked like Mr. Monopoly with a crown, but he didn't seem to represent anyone in the place.

We liked this weekly trip because it was a regular thing we could do all together. Our parents didn't particularly want us there in the first place and they did not seem to consider this all that much fun, so we could run around. No one working there knew you, so you could misbehave.

It was also an opportunity to refine your pestering skills. You needed practice against our mother, who was full of surprise in battle.

"Ma, can we get this?": Hershey's syrup.

"No."

"Why not?"

"It makes you drink too much milk." Tough, you see.