I walked two blocks to see my cousins on Prospect Avenue. Most of my family lived within a two-block radius from Clinton Avenue. Grandma Rose lived upstairs until she moved to California to be with her sisters. My mom's family was all between a block and a half to three blocks away.
The neighborhood was entirely white except for a black family around the corner and an older Puerto Rican couple who were quiet—none of that loud music and screaming.
That changed the next year when Puerto Ricans moved in by the dozens, displacing the German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish families in a mass exodus.
But I digress. On my way to visit my cousins, I encountered a crowd near my uncle's building. Someone had jumped from the top of a five-story tenement. I watched from across the street as police arrived at the chaotic scene. I couldn't tell if the person was male or female from what remained on the concrete sidewalk. What I do remember: no shoes, and blood seeping into the black asphalt gutter beside a fire hydrant. People said the person had hit the hydrant.
It's strange what an eight-year-old notices.
A Catholic priest arrived from the church two blocks away, wearing his white linen surplice and purple stole. He knelt beside the body, bowed his head in prayer, and blessed it. The crowd fell silent. One of my relatives hurried me home before they removed the body.
On my way, I passed a man with hooks for both hands, his face badly scarred from what looked like burn wounds. Someone later told me he was a World War II veteran, blown up by a grenade.
As I approached our building, a woman in her twenties walked toward me, her arms flailing, her face twisted, her legs moving in different directions. I turned and walked down the block the other way. It seemed to take tremendous effort just for her to walk. Muscular dystrophy, I supposed.
My younger brother was outside playing with the little girl next door—both around four or five years old. At the sight of the woman, they ran upstairs and hid under the crib of the girl's baby sister. As fate would have it, the woman entered our building to visit the girl's grandmother on the second floor. Before going to the grandmother's apartment, she stopped to see the new baby in their apartment across the hall. The two children cowered under the crib while she stood looking at the infant with the girl's mother.
I stayed downstairs.
Across the street, a boy my age was trying to walk up the stairs to his building. He had braces on both legs. Polio. I felt fortunate to have received my polio vaccination that year.
After the woman left, my mom gave me twenty-one cents to take my brother to the corner candy store for ice cream cones—eleven cents each. My brother got vanilla. I saved my eleven cents for later.
As we walked, Joseph enjoyed his cone while we passed a group of men shooting craps between two parked cars on Clinton Avenue. Suddenly, two police cars roared down the block in one direction while two unmarked cars came up the wrong side of the one-way street. The men scattered—gambling on the street was illegal. Someone had ratted them out.
One of the men knocked my brother down as he ran. His glasses flew in one direction; the vanilla cone in the other. He cried hysterically. After the police arrested two of the gamblers, I used my eleven cents to buy Joseph a replacement cone. I sat on the stoop with a long face while he ate it.
My burly Uncle Pete came walking down the street. "What's the matter?" he asked.
I told him the story and described the pock-marked face of the man who'd knocked Joseph down.
"Come with me. Joseph, stay here," Uncle Pete commanded.
We walked into the candy store. A few guys stood around the counter stools. "That guy?" Pete asked, pointing.
"Yeah," I answered.
Uncle Pete walked up to him and hit him once. The man went down. The others froze. Pete reached into the man's pocket, pulled out two dollars, and handed them to me.
"Next time you knock a kid down, go back and see if he's alright, you bastard."
Later that afternoon, I returned to the candy store. I bought a chocolate cone, a lanyard to make a keychain, and a pink Spalding ball for box ball. I had a dollar ten left over.
What a day!
