by Robert Klein
It was an anxious and unhappy trip up the elevator home. Though my father was frequently more bark than bite, that bark could be terrifying, along with the anticipation of an occasional smack. I did receive a hard one across the face this time, signifying the seriousness he attached to the issue. In short, my dueling days were over, at least during the hours that my father might be home, though I had to be careful lest some adult neighbor tell on me.
I was forbidden a cap gun for playing cowboys and Indians because my father considered caps to be explosives, and besides, he said, “It gives me a headache.” My mother said she’d heard of a boy who went deaf from a cap gun. Certain bad boys would light fires among the rubbish in the lots, sometimes bringing a fire truck to the scene—an event that caused much excitement and heads popping out of windows. In order to make sure I never lit fires, my father issued a two-pronged warning. First he reminded me of the pain associated with fire, and second that if I were caught, I would have a criminal record. Could reform school be far behind? The possibility of a life behind bars, like the animals in the Bronx Zoo, was quite an unappealing prospect.
No lesson was more repeated than the absolute command to look both ways before stepping into the street, which was referred to as the gutter. This was boilerplate stuff for all neighborhood children, as we lived in an urban environment with a fair amount of vehicular traffic, and the street was our playground. We were taught a song in school called “Let the Ball Roll,” though we all forgot at times. These were the words of the song: “Let the ball roll, let the ball roll. / No matter where it may go. Let the ball roll, / Let the ball roll. It has to stop somewhere, you know. / Often a truck will flatten the ball. / And make it look like an egg. / Though you can get many a ball, / you never can get a new leg.” The song notwithstanding, there wasn’t one of us who had not had a frightening close call while chasing a ball into the street, with a car screeching noisily to a stop and a cursing driver relieved to know that he had not killed someone’s child.
As usual, my father took the radical scary approach and made use of object lessons, frequently showing me newspaper accounts and pictures of boys hit by cars, maimed by firecrackers, burned by starting fires, killed by falling out of buildings, disabled by baseball bats, and paralyzed by horseplay they saw in the movies. On-site object lessons, when available, were also part of his repertoire. On one occasion he pulled me out of a curb-ball game hard by the arm and began walking me down the Decatur Avenue hill toward Gun Hill Road. “Where’re we going, Dad? I was in the middle of a game.”
“Never mind your game. This is more important. This is life and death.” I could see a crowd and a police car in front of Frank’s fruit store. My father, never letting go of my arm, forced his way through the crowd toward the object of everybody’s curiosity. It was a horrifying sight. A woman was lying barely conscious in the gutter. She had been hit by a car, her grocery bag spilled over, with potatoes and apples rolling down the steep hill toward Webster Avenue. Her right leg was terribly mangled and bloodied so I could see the bone. The blood flowed down the hill as well, forming tiny eddies in the grooves and bulges of the cobblestones. I was stunned and felt sick. My father grabbed me aside. “See that? That’s what happens when you don’t look both ways.”
“How do you know she didn’t look both ways, Dad? Maybe she did and the driver didn’t see her.”
“Don’t be a wise guy,” he replied.
My mother had her own crusade for safety and longevity. When I requested her written permission to play hardball in the Police Athletic League, she looked at me incredulously, like I was a lunatic asking to eat a bicycle, and said, “Hardball? Hardball?” She hardly contained her emotion as she launched into a quick and illustrative horror story (she always had one on hand) of a boy mutilated by a hardball. Her voice would always drop to a somber sotto voce whisper when she got to the description of the affliction: “Hardball? Sure, like that boy on Hull Avenue who got a hardball right in the head. [whispers] He walks backward now.”
“How about football?” I suggested.
“Football? Football? Like that boy on Perry Avenue who got hit by all those boys and now [whispers] he can’t spell his name and thinks he’s Abraham Lincoln. He was an excellent student, and now he sells The Bronx Home News and plays potsy with the girls.”
Even playing checkers had its risks and parental provisos, though it was not forbidden. “A boy on Webster Avenue [whispers] died from a checker.” Yes, the idiot had tried to swallow one and choked in full view of three friends, or so the story went. Anyway, what could you expect thirty years before the Heimlich maneuver? I never had even the slightest desire to swallow a checker.
My father played baseball as a kid on East Seventy-seventh Street, and he regaled me with stories of his adventures as a catcher in hostile neighborhoods. He referred to the oft-quoted definition of catchers’ equipment as “the tools of ignorance,” because it was, he emphasized, the most dangerous position on the field and was to be avoided. Never mind that he played catcher; the point was that his experience should be enough to keep me from a similar fate. There was an implication that he had suffered so I wouldn’t have to, though I suspect he had a lot of fun playing catcher despite the lumps and bumps. Like many American fathers, he taught his son to catch and throw. When I was very little, he naturally threw softly to me. The trouble was that in the name of safety, he continued to throw like that to me when I was twelve and older. At a time when my friends and I threw fast and hard in pepper games, my father was lobbing baby throws and yelling, “Careful! Watch out!”
Softball was acceptable as long as I didn’t play catcher or slide, and watched out for swinging bats. There came a time, I believe it was the age of nine, when my father decided I was old enough to get a proper glove, bat, and hard ball—with conditions. “Listen to me,” he said. “Never, never throw a hard ball at someone’s head.” This admonition seemed self-evident, but I solemnly promised. “Keep your eye on your mitt, and don’t let anybody steal it. Most of all, watch out that you don’t get hit in the head with a bat and never never swing your bat around anyone else.”
“Okay, Daddy, I promise.”
The Hijinks sporting-goods store, located under the noisy elevated Woodlawn train across from the movie theater, was the sports-equipment mecca for the neighborhood boys. Anytime we passed the store, we would press our noses to the window to admire the merchandise. But today I was not just looking. Today was to be that most joyous and rare occasion when an actual purchase would be made. Jinks himself, the proprietor, showed us an assortment of left-handed mitts and beautiful bats. The smell of new leather permeated the place, with row upon row of boxes holding treasures that every boy wants, school jackets and authentic uniforms. I chose a first-baseman’s glove, a Ferris Fain model, and a smallish brown bat, a Frankie Frisch model. Actually, my father chose the bat. Frisch had been an excellent bunter for the New York Giants of the thirties, and I think my safety-conscious father reckoned that I would emulate the bat’s bunting namesake and rarely swing it. On the walk home, my father extolled the virtues of bunting and how important it was to the game. He strangely omitted the fact that bunting involves facing the pitcher with your legs spread and your fingers exposed, so if no contact was made, a boy could take a ball in the balls.
I carried the bat, rubbing my hand along its smooth surface, feeling its heft and the perfectly formed knob on the end. I shadow-bunted as we walked, in homage to my father. His warnings in mind, I nevertheless wanted to try a swing, so I ran thirty feet ahead of him to a place on the sidewalk without people. I swung and announced in radio fashion that I’d just hit a home run to win the World Series. “Watch out there,” my father said. Then he caught up to me, and I ran ahead again and swung again and homered again. On the next at-bat, I took an imaginary pitch for a ball. On the next pitch, I swung and hit something. It was my father’s head. He let out a “Yow!” and grabbed his head, and I was afraid that I’d killed him like that boy in
the New York Post who had whacked his brother. “I’m sorry, Daddy, oh God, I’m sorry! Are you okay?” He just rubbed his jaw and said, “See? I told you not to swing it around people! I told you!”
I went from horrified to ashamed as he took the bat from my hands. The amazing thing was that despite his pain, he actually seemed pleased that the incident had happened, that it had vindicated his lectures on caution. “I told you. Now you’ll learn.” He preferred being someone who was hit by a bat and could say “I told you so” to prove his point. After all, what would I have learned if I hadn’t hit anybody? He made sure I knew he was feeling pain. As a lesson, in addition to fear, there was guilt, which could also make a strong impression on me.
One of the most interesting of the ironclad safety measures was that my father insisted I wait one hour after eating before going in swimming; something about dangerous cramping. This was probably derived from some myth about a kid who drowned in the East River in 1924 after eating an entire pot roast. Waiting a bit after a meal before swimming is not a bad idea. But with true Ben Klein hyperbole, I was warned that if I didn’t wait one full hour and not a second less, I would instantly sink like a rock and die a choking, gurgling death. “You’ll go right to Davy Jones’s locker,” my father would say ominously. I had a rough idea of what Davy Jones’s locker was: a place of ruin and dead bodies and sharks eating them. The specter of death by drowning is a potent one to a ten-year-old. I recalled a scene from a movie in which a man was tortured by having his head held underwater until he was begging for mercy and nearly dead. I remembered being held underwater myself by bigger boys during horseplay, and I had never forgotten being knocked over by an ocean wave, most of which I inhaled, and the desperate fight for breath, which I thought would never come again.
I was therefore scrupulous about waiting the full amount of time, regardless of the hot sun and the sight of other kids swimming happily ten minutes after eating. Their parents were evidently irresponsible. The idea of waiting exactly one hour was etched into my brain like a mental tattoo, as if the food would know precisely what period of time had passed since I ate it. One hour—okay; fifty-nine minutes—dead. When I got a little older, my father explained that I really didn’t need to wait a full hour. The actual amount of time a child would have to wait before swimming depended on what the child ate, and my father was the arbiter at the pool or beach who would decide such things. “What did you have, a tuna-salad sandwich? With a pickle?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-three minutes. Peanut butter and jelly? Twenty-seven minutes. Bologna and cheese? Forty-two minutes. Frankfurters and beans? Too heavy. You can’t go in swimming this year.”
Protecting the children from harm is admirable, but there are limits, and I sometimes got the sense that my mother and father would have preferred to keep me wrapped up in a padded room at home for safety’s sake: hardly a prescription for an intrepid child. In retrospect, I would say my parents had a different approach to child rearing than, say, Evel Knievel’s parents, or the Flying Wallendas of circus aerial fame. With all due respect, the family Wallenda has exhibited certain lemming-like tendencies and has diminished considerably in size over the years. This is a result of their specialty, the most dangerous aerial stunt ever performed. It is called the Seven and consists of a pyramid of seven Wallendas with a young lady on a chair at the top. It is performed about sixty feet above the arena with, quite literally, no net. The unfortunate dearth of Wallendas can be traced to this questionable no-net policy stubbornly adhered to by the family and its patriarch, Karl Wallenda. My mother would not have approved of my participation in such an enterprise, and never would have signed the permission form. My father would have shown me newspaper photos of a splattered aerialist on the circus floor to discourage me from such pursuits. It was a sad fact but true, something I had to live with every day of my childhood: I would never climb Mount Everest.
Chapter Two
Challenging Mrs. Graux
My academic education from kindergarten through high school was acquired entirely in the public schools of New York City. It was, for the most part, a good fundamental education that used orthodox, one may say, old-fashioned methods. We memorized our multiplication tables, and we memorized the important dates of American history. My sixth-grade teacher, Miss Links, took great pride in her ability to recite the names of the presidents . . . backward.
We were imbued with the proper patriotism associated with the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States of America, though it was taught through the distant prism of myth and legend. We learned that George Washington and company were infallible, godlike men, the kind of men whose names Bronx schoolchildren would memorize almost two centuries later. I am referring to those indelible yet fallacious images from textbooks and old calendars of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, or throwing a dollar across the Potomac. None of the complex nuances of risk, intelligence, luck, British blunders, or European politics were presented to us as necessary components of the Revolutionary War. It was simple: The British wore bright red uniforms that were easy to see, and they marched in a line to be slaughtered by the clever American colonists who hid behind trees in the manner of the Indians from the French and Indian War. (The French and Indian War. Even as a subsequent history major, this is a war I still can’t quite figure out. It seems to have been at least partially fomented by the French, as usual, and they lost, as usual.)
In any case, with respect to the American Revolution, I have since learned how compromise, particularly the putting off of the slavery question to another time—was so crucial to the forming of the United States and the creation of the Constitution. To be sure, many of the true facts of the founding of the union have come out at the millennium, when historians and DNA experts were given the latitude to declare that the great author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, actually did have sex with his slave and sire at least one child. As for George Washington, I have done a good deal of reading about him and have concluded that he was an even more extraordinary man than we were taught. The nonsense we were fed about his father’s cherry tree and other myths was straight out of Mason Locke Weems’s inaccurate, glorifying biography Life of Washington, published after the president’s death.
The truth is that Washington’s life had all the elements of greatness. He risked hanging by the British; with little previous experience, he became a worthy general; he willed that his slaves be freed and compensated after his death; he was the one man, admired by all, who could unite disparate factions to form the union; and, most spectacularly, he gave up power at its pinnacle, a course of action unprecedented in the world up to that time. Through a convergence of fate and luck, he was the right man at the right time, the Father of Our Country in every way, to whom we owe so much. We purport to be a patriotic people. I know George Washington would be proud to know that we celebrate his birthday every year with a mattress sale. And tawdry used car dealers hawking on TV, wearing wigs and three-corner hats and holding hatchets.
Though the teaching of history was clouded with inaccuracy and anecdote, the basics of the other subjects we learned in school were sound. We were taught early to read and write, and each child had his or her own pace. We were divided into three groups according to our reading skills, each with a different text according to difficulty. The less sensitive teachers would simply call them Groups One, Two, and Three. The more tactful teachers would give them names like Bluebirds, Robins, and Eagles, but everyone knew that the Eagles were the best readers and the Bluebirds were the dummies.
“Dummy” was a common noun in the early fifties, and a favorite of certain teachers, political correctness being an unknown concept at the time. Unlike anyplace I knew this side of the Iron Curtain, New York City had the depersonalizing practice of using numbers instead of names for schools: Think Steel Factory #8 in Minsk. Still, we were encouraged to take pride in our school, often exemplified by singing the school song at the weekly
assembly in the auditorium. Instead of singing a sentimental anthem to the likes of the Abraham Lincoln School or the Mark Twain School, we were content to sing about the glory of Public School 94 or Junior High School 80. These were true school songs sung by enthusiastic children, full of emotion and spirit, and all paying homage to the glorious name of two- and three-digit numbers. Here are some of the lyrics as I remember them. An up-tempo march: “I wanna be the kind of boy that 94 can boast about. / I wanna be the kind of boy that it can never live without.” The female pupils sang the word “girl,” which came out in the aggregate “I wanna be the kind of birl that 94 can boast about.” I remember another marching song in tribute to my junior high school: “80 . . . dear 80 . . . , your name will rise above.” I can’t remember what 80 was supposed to rise above, but I assume 79. There were even spiritual, slow hymns designed to draw tears: “We revere the halls of 113. We praise thee, oh glorious 113.”
