The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  The halls smelled of pies baking in the afternoon and boiled chicken and broiling lamb chops in the evening, all of it mixed with the scents of hundreds of people. I could always smell women’s perfumes, which lingered particularly in the elevator. The grown-ups were pure elevator types, going down in them as well as up, never taking the stairs. It became my dream to live in a place someday where I could say I was going out instead of going down, complete with a backyard and trees and no dog shit on the ground.

  Until they were built on later, for most of my childhood there were three hilly vacant lots on the block. The two at the north end of the block, closest to the cemetery, were our unofficial playgrounds. On the west, relatively level side, we played softball, while the east lot was used for cowboys and Indians and soldier games. We were brought up in the glory of World War II and the concomitant Hollywood movies about it, so that all of us liked to play soldier. I saw Halls of Montezuma and Sands of Iwo Jima three times and could not hold back tears at the end. A particular favorite was called Who Dies Best? In this war game, the contest was about who could die the most authentic death after being shot. The shooter would announce the caliber and type of weapon, and the victim would charge the foxhole, get shot, grab his stomach, and fall as spectacularly as possible. We made not the slightest connection between our game and the reality of war and combat, not seeing the irony of being exuberant in a sensational death—albeit a painless one—as the movies and newsreels had always sanitized the carnage.

  The steep bumpy terrain of the northeast lot provided a thrilling, if brief, sled run in the winter and was hyperbolically called Dead Man’s Hill. In season, there were major weekend softball games among the biggest kids on the block, some of whom were sixteen and seventeen, and it was a great rite of passage for a thirteen-year-old to finally be allowed to play. Nobody paid attention to the boulder behind first base in fair territory, called the Big Fat Rock, which was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and upon which we played King of the Mountain.

  All of the lots were repositories of castaway junk, broken glass, the occasional dead rat, and the fecal matter of dozens of local dogs in a time long before scooper laws. It was standard procedure to check one’s shoes constantly, especially before entering the house, as we were forever stepping in it. My mother would have me bend my leg back at the knee so she could inspect the soles of my shoes, like a blacksmith examining a hoof. Removing the foul stuff in the street could be difficult. It required ingenuity and improvisation, using whatever tools we could find in the lots, like newspaper and small pieces of wood. If all else failed, the metal edge of the curb was the last resort.

  The street itself—called the gutter as opposed to the sidewalk—was a major playground, and there were games for all seasons. Fungo stickball, in which the batter threw the Spaldeen up and hit it without a pitcher, was a staple. So were curb ball and association football, which could be played with as few as two boys on a side. Parked cars were reference points for someone going out for a pass, as in: “Go to the Buick, fake, and then I’ll hit you at the Plymouth.” Cars coming up and down the street were a bother, but someone would yell “Car!” and play would suspend until it safely passed. It was strictly against the unwritten rules to yell “Car!” if none was there, and no one ever did.

  We also played with the Spaldeen on the sidewalk. Box baseball was popular, which used the lines between the four-foot squares of concrete as boundaries, placing the players about sixteen feet apart, and the boy who was pitching would put a spin on the ball so that it bounced off the sidewalk oddly, making it more difficult to hit with the opponent’s open palm. We also flipped baseball cards from the curb to the wall of the building; the nearest card to the wall won, and the winner took the loser’s cards. Blackjack and poker became popular, with baseball cards as the street currency that was valuable indeed, especially the rare ones, though none of us ever thought of the cards as a future investment. When they outgrew them, the big kids would have a “hot scramble,” in which they would throw hundreds of cards out the window like a ticker-tape parade, and forty little kids would scramble to collect them in the street below, like they were nuggets of gold.

  We played skully, in which we struck bottle caps weighted with wax, by releasing the middle finger from under the thumb, which made them slide across the sidewalk. Marbles were strangely out of vogue on Decatur Avenue at that time. The girls jumped rope and played jacks on the sidewalk. They played with the Spaldeen as well, but instead of stickball and curb ball, they would bounce the thing while reciting old rhymes: “A, my name is Alice, and my sister’s name is Alicia, and we come from Albany.” On every word with the letter A, they would cross a leg over the ball and then go to the next letter of the alphabet, and so on: a more literate approach to game playing. Potsy was another favorite of the girls, and the only game that girls and boys sometimes played together, though as a boy got older, he did not especially want to be seen playing potsy. I don’t remember the rules of potsy, but it involved throwing your keys and hopping.

  One September day, we were playing stickball in the asphalt gutter, and a small black truck arrived at the building across the street from mine. It said MORTUARY DIVISION on the two doors in the back, and a police car accompanied it. Word quickly spread that they were there to remove a dead body from the building, and the curious, including us, formed a crowd around the vehicle. Dozens of heads popped out of windows to see what was going on, as they always did when an ambulance, fire truck, or police car made an appearance on the street, or a loud verbal ruckus ensued between two people after the same parking space. The attendants came out of the building carrying the body in a leathery black bag, placed it in the truck, and drove off to the morgue.

  My friends and I did not resume our game. Instead, we sat down on the curb and began discussing what we had just seen; about what happens to a dead body; about heaven and hell; and the most difficult concept of all—finality. That night was the first of many that I thought and dreamed, indeed obsessed, about death. There were two aspects to my obsession: One was the fear that my mother or father would die; and the second was my contemplation of the state of death itself, what it would be like to die and be buried. The burial part was particularly distressing to my claustrophobic nature, fueled no doubt by my reading Tales from the Crypt comic books at my aunt Laura’s candy store on Tremont Avenue. While my father chatted with my aunt at the counter, I would sit in a musty booth at the back and absorb tales of people buried alive who came out of the grave dead, dripping rotting flesh, and exacted revenge. There was a horrible odor in the back of the candy store of must and decay, caused by decomposing sugar syrup and the leftover soda in the returnable bottles. I associated the foul smell with graves and the stench of decaying bodies that I could almost sense leaping off the page of the brilliant but ghastly comic-book illustrations.

  I worried constantly about my father’s health, which as a matter of fact was excellent. When he took a nap, I would make it a point to see that he wasn’t dead, checking his chest for motion to prove he was alive. If the breathing seemed imperceptible, I would intentionally make a loud noise to evoke from him a groan or a movement of his body to indicate that my greatest fear had not been realized. For some reason, though I loved her as much, I did not have the same concern about the sudden death of my mother. I would hear in school that someone’s father had died—usually of a heart attack—much more often than I would hear the news of a mother’s death. The mothers seemed more frequently to die a lingering death from cancer.

  These questions of life vis-à-vis death vexed me as a child. I did not want to be buried in some lonely, distantly located cemetery that no one would visit, especially since my ashes could be conveniently located in the living room. And how could I know or care if anybody was visiting? I’d be dead, right? As a small child, I had visited my grandparents’ graves once in the old Mount Hebron Cemetery, near the World’s Fair grounds. Unlike Woodlawn, there was row upon row of graves crowded tog
ether with tall headstones, which gave the site a close, claustrophobic feel in addition to its significance as a place of death. I was especially haunted by the graves of children who had died forty years earlier: Were they still children? Many of these headstones contained metallic photographs of the children, which was a custom of the day. Some were about my age and buried six feet beneath the cold ground. I had several bad dreams after the cemetery visit, so my parents avoided taking me again, which was fine with me. In contemplating cremation, however, Tales from the Crypt once again crept into my thought process, and burning alive is only slightly less appalling than buried alive—well, not alive, exactly, because you’re dead, and you’re not supposed to feel anything. Maybe I could hedge my bet and get cremated in a fireproof suit.

  * * *

  After seven years at P.S. 94, it was time to move on to junior high school, which stretched my parameters—in truth, my world—eight blocks south and west to Mosholu Parkway. Once again I walked to school. I never took a school bus in my life. There I encountered the social culture of my fellow teenagers. In the evenings (excluding the dead of winter), a hundred kids or more would gather on the Mosholu Parkway fence, across the street from the school.

  It was in junior high school that I first encountered male teachers and different teachers in different classrooms for various subjects, which was called “departmental” and seemed so grown up. The change of periods was a refreshing departure from the humdrum of one classroom and one teacher from nine to three.

  It was also at this time that I made some friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Hanging out frequently on the parkway fence had to wait until high school, however, as my parents kept a tight rein on my weekday evenings. DeWitt Clinton High School was an all-boys institution that 90 percent of the neighborhood boys attended. It had a sort of macho tradition and a long and venerable list of distinguished graduates, such as Burt Lancaster, James Baldwin, Paddy Chayevsky, and Neil Simon. It also had a police car permanently parked near the front entrance, for those students who were less distinguished. When I was a little boy, I could not help but notice the distinctive red-and-black Clinton jackets worn by the big kids, as if they belonged to some mystical fraternity. The walk to DeWitt Clinton was twelve blocks or approximately one half mile, but the center of my social life became Mosholu Parkway, specifically, the three-foot-high steel piping that constituted the fence where the guys and chicks would gather. Decatur Avenue became just a place to sleep.

  The parkway was an exciting experience, given the energy and vitality of its inhabitants, synergized by their sheer numbers. Most were good kids and attentive students, with a sprinkling of “rocks,” who in a later era were referred to as “greasers.” That type was portrayed in a cartoon way on television as Fonzie from Happy Days, which was created by Garry Marshall, who hung out on the parkway several years before I did. His sister Penny was more my contemporary, and I held hands with her cute gum-cracking redheaded friend Margie Pace. A stylish young fellow named Ralph Lifschitz would park his little British automobile, a Morgan, amid the admiring kids. In a few years, he would metamorphose, like a caterpillar into a butterfly, as Ralph Lauren. Interestingly, Calvin Klein lived a few buildings away, but I cannot recall him hanging out on the parkway.

  I had, for the first time, achieved a kind of social status. I was funny; clowning was my old standby, my longtime ticket out of anonymity—and fights. I had a new passion: singing in a rock-and-roll vocal quartet called the TeenTones. Doo-wop vocals were all the rage, and our harmony was good for amateurs, bearing in mind that amateurs could quickly become recording artists in the fledgling rock-and-roll business of the mid-fifties, or so we hoped. Our group began attracting the attention of the kids on the parkway; people listened, clapped, and showed appreciation. When the weather was inclement, we would sing inside and vibrate the concrete halls of the junior high school, which became a recreation center in the evening. At DeWitt Clinton, the rehearsal room of choice was the men’s room, with its marvelous echoes and unfortunate bouquet. When we harmonized in the men’s room, it sounded like we were singing in a recording studio, albeit an unsavory one. It was definitely our best sound. Oddly, whenever we harmonized anywhere else, it sounded like we were singing in a men’s room.

  I was a TeenTone to the core. From the moment my gaze fell in the morning on the beige ceiling of the family living room where I slept on a convertible bed, to the nighttime parallel-line shadows of the streetlights coming through the venetian blinds upon which I plotted my future before sleep, I thought and breathed TeenTones. You could say the group was my obsession, my hope, my ambition. School was just a six-hour interruption of the life of a TeenTone. Bellowing three- and four-part harmonies freed me. They call it doo-wop now, but I don’t recall that expression used in the fifties, when groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Heartbeats, and the Cadillacs were hitting the charts. We idolized Frankie Lymon and his group particularly, because they were young high school kids like us.

  In any event, the TeenTones were not in that elite group just yet, our performances largely confined to park fences and school toilets, yet people told us we were good, and we believed them, and it fueled us to rehearse the hit tunes and make up new ones. We were a neighborhood hit, and I began to notice the rapt and admiring attention of postpubescent girls who had paid little attention to me before. Life was looking up for the TeenTones, and now there was talk of auditioning for an appearance on the Original Amateur Hour, a creaking but nonetheless network television program on ABC. Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour was outdated even by nineteen-fifties standards, but TeenTones couldn’t be choosers, and the prospect thrilled us and gave us ever more incentive to improve.

  All of this heady stuff was swirling in my mind one chilly November evening as I walked the eight blocks or so to rehearsal. I was wearing my Clinton jacket, which, though very much in vogue, was not warm enough to match the cold and brisk wind of a Bronx winter. Local mothers and fathers had always dressed their little boys up for the season—“You don’t want to catch cold”—with mittens, sweaters, scarves and bulky, unstylish coats. The worst of it was that we were forced to wear hats with ear laps—there was nothing shmuckier or less cool than ear laps. For a big kid, it was a macho sign to one’s peers to brave the cold with less, not more: no jackets below the waist, no hat.

  I was headed for the parkway. The TeenTones would be practicing at the junior high school, which was open three nights a week for basketball, Ping-Pong, and knock hockey. Our favorite rehearsal venue was the first-floor boys’ toilet; but if the odor and traffic became unmanageable and interfered with our artistry, the echo of the concrete stairwells would do nicely. Anyway, we had discovered that the girls couldn’t watch us if we sang in the boys’ room. We made a perfect acoustical accompaniment to the bouncing of basketballs and the cracking of knock-hockey pucks, and small groups of kids gathered to listen.

  I walked up the hill with an icy wind in my face and my hands in my jacket pockets, toward Reservoir Oval, which was a park and athletic field converted from the old Williamsbridge Reservoir in one of those wonderful Depression-era construction projects designed to create work. And beautiful work it was, the kind of workmanship one would seldom see today, featuring a carved stone main building and walkways of octagonal tiles. The Oval was about a mile in circumference, and though it had a decorative five-foot-high fence (pickets of black painted steel with a horizontal beam at the top and bottom), one could enter at several ornate stone entrances placed around it. In a time-saving pinch, the fence could be climbed, as its function was more aesthetic than utilitarian. My route would take me about one quarter of the way around the Oval before I had to proceed west several more blocks to Mosholu Parkway and the school. The Oval had an upper level inside the fence, which ran next to the circular street (called Reservoir Oval Avenue), forming two large concentric circles or, more properly, ovals. I had the option of walking around the top level or on the sidewalk across the st
reet: I had gone both ways many times on the way to school, but I usually preferred the outside-street route in the evening.

  Inside the park, one could descend the thirty steps to the lower level, where there was a football field, a running track, tennis courts, and several playground areas containing swings, seesaws, and monkey bars. This was not considered a wise thing to do after dark, as the lower level was said to be the gathering place for youths bent on lower pursuits. These guys were from east of the Oval and beyond, a different neighborhood altogether, and strangers to us. We had heard stories of kids who’d ventured down at the wrong time and had been harassed and beaten, and some had had money stolen. It was referred to as getting jumped. In the daytime, evidence of these strangers’ pleasure and malfeasance could be seen in the bushes: beer bottles, cigarette butts, and discarded condoms.

  When I got to the top of the hill near the entrance to the Oval, I saw two old men in the dim light of the lampposts. They had just entered and were strolling around the upper level of the park, conversing with their hands behind their backs. There was no one else in sight. I could see the slight shine from their satin yarmulkes, which told me that they were fresh from evening services at the Gun Hill Jewish Center, one hundred yards to the left. As this was a Wednesday night, the turnout would be sparse, indicating that these old gentlemen were pious indeed. Perhaps the sight of them provided a sort of comfort, as the presence of grown-ups usually did in dark and deserted places. So that night I chose the inside-park route. I undertook a brisk pace along the upper walk of the Oval. In short order, I was overtaking the two men, whose tempo was more leisurely, and as they heard my footsteps, each turned a little anxiously to see who was behind him. I suppose it amused me that they might consider me a threat, followed immediately by the empathetic desire to reassure them and let them know that I was just a good boy who meant no harm, on his way to a TeenTones rehearsal. I wanted to shout out, “Just passing! Not going to jump you!,” but I didn’t. I created a Boy Scout voice for a most cheery and innocent “Good evening,” and passed by them innocently, like a figure from a Norman Rockwell painting, humming the various harmony parts we would be rehearsing shortly. I had another few minutes of walking to do before I would exit, and the coast was clear.