Old Neighborhood (14 page)

“My name is Robbins,” I called out. “I used to live in this apartment. I was wondering if I could come in.”

The door opened several inches, held in place by a chain.

“Are you a burglar?” a man’s voice asked.

“I really used to live here. About twenty years ago. Next door was a Mrs. Corrigan. Could I look around, just for memories?”

The door opened and a man in his twenties, taller than I, sturdy-looking, was standing there.

“You better not be a burglar.”

“I just want to look at where I lived. I appreciate this.”

The floors, which had been bare, were now covered by carpeting, a modern bedroom set was placed in what had been my parents’ room, the living room and my bedroom were reversed. Our living room was a children’s bedroom with bunk beds, my bedroom was their living room.

“It’s a little bit turned around. I used to sleep in there.”

I walked into my old room and I looked out the window. I used to watch from there to see if any stickball games were under way. Jerry and Arthur would stand below and call up to me. I stepped away from the window and rested my forehead against the wall.

“You okay, Mister?” the man asked.

“No.”

I turned to him.

“I used to be very happy in this room.”

“Can I get you a drink of water or something?”

“Please. Bronx water.”

He gave me a glass of water and I drank it down.

“This was a good neighborhood,” I said.

“It’s still pretty good, compared to some places.”

“You have children?” I asked.

“Two boys. My wife is a teacher. I’m a police officer.”

“Then it’s lucky for me I’m not a burglar.”

Years before, I had made a tiny drawing with India ink and a pen in a secret place, just above the molding in the bottom of the bedroom closet. “Stevie was here,” I had drawn, in the style of “Kilroy was here.”

“This may look odd,” I said to the man as I got on my knees and searched in the bottom of the closet. It was still there, missed by house painters over the years, “Stevie was here.”

After I left the apartment, I wandered through the neighborhood, past the Kingsbridge Armory, P.S. 86, then along the Jerome Park reservoir and the campus of what had been Hunter College and was now called Lehman College. I stopped at the sandlot diamonds at Harris Field. A few joggers were running the route along the reservoir. I did not think I was capable of running twenty yards.

I walked back to Kingsbridge Road, the neighborhood was busy with street life, teenagers were gathered in front of the pizza store, people were walking dogs, the stores were busy with shoppers. Even on a warm summer day the pulse was more active than anything I had known in the suburbs. I took the subway and returned to Great Neck by train.

I was back the next day. And the next. And the next. I kept coming back. I rose each day to an alarm clock, showered, shaved, dressed in clean clothes and made the trip to the Bronx. After a while I trusted myself to drive. I went to sleep early and awoke each morning with a purpose. Going back had become my reason for being. I strolled with the strollers. I leaned against cars. I bought sandwiches and ate on park benches. I watched card games played by old men in Poe Park. I sat silently at the end of dark Irish bars drinking beer in the middle of afternoons. I peered through the fence looking at teenagers play basketball. I haunted my old neighborhood like a restless ghost.

T
HE FISHERS’ CANDY STORE
was now run by a man named Chris Anton, who had attempted to modernize the place with a new Formica counter and a griddle for fast-food items, a candy-store owner with delusions of luncheonettes. The aroma was gone, that special smell created by spearmint leaves, jujubes and assorted ecstasies.

“Do you sell loose candy?” I had asked him.

“It’s not worth it,” he said. He was in his early fifties, a pudgy, sad-faced man.

“Could I have an egg cream?”

He made it with too much syrup, too little milk, too much foam. The man did not know what he was doing.

“How much?” I asked.

“Forty cents.”

“I used to work here. An egg cream was six cents.”

“It costs me six cents to wash the glass,” he said somberly.

The store was on the south side of Kingsbridge Road, a few doors east of Jerome Avenue. I stopped in regularly for sodas and sandwiches, and Chris Anton began to feel free enough to complain to me. Costs were high, he had to compete with the pizza store, the coffee shop and a McDonald’s. I did not view the McDonald’s which had opened on Jerome Avenue as a sign of the neighborhood’s vitality, but as an invasion of suburbia. I sympathized with Chris, a man who was like Joe Btsfplk from the old Li’l Abner comic strip, a character with a perpetual rain cloud over his head.

Occasionally I would see a face in the neighborhood that looked familiar, but after twenty years of being away from here, the people I had known were gone. I strolled to other neighborhoods, the Ascot Theater, home of
Open City
and the
Fanny
trilogy had met with tragedy in my view. It was a porno house. Walking farther south along the Grand Concourse, it appeared at first that the area was not blighted, but when I went only one or two blocks east or west of the Grand Concourse it was like stepping off a cliff, neighborhoods were sliding into filth and neglect. Compared to these neighborhoods, mine had been spared, whites, Hispanics and blacks had managed a kind of balance between them, landlords had not abandoned buildings, the city agencies had not neglected services. The place where I had grown up was holding on, my roots had not been obliterated.

One morning I parked near St. James Park, opened the trunk of the car and removed a newly purchased basketball. Wearing a T-shirt, dungarees and sneakers, I walked to a vacant basketball court, my first time on a court in years, and with the move I had imagined, dribbled down the right side for my drifting off-the-court push shot. I felt a stabbing pain in my shoulder and I missed the rim by two feet.

I tossed the ball a few inches above my head, catching it and flipping it up again, getting a sense of the grain and the weight of the ball against my fingertips. I dribbled slowly to the basket and carefully laid it up and in. A beginning. I shot baskets for an hour, never quite making that drifting push shot, and then sat with my back against a fence, exhausted. Several teenage boys came by, shooting baskets, jocking around. “Wanna play?” one of them called out to me. I shook my head, no. That would have been a new category of suicide—Suicide by Schoolyard Basketball.

I went to the candy store for an egg cream. Chris Anton made a flat, murky drink for me.

“Chris, this is a sophisticated drink. It’s for the candy-store connoisseur.”

“I know I’ve been doing it wrong,” he said, mournfully. “Why don’t you show me?”

I came behind the counter and made the drink as he watched, trying to add old soda-jerk’s flourish, diverting the seltzer off the spoon into the glass. Along with my push shot, another misplaced move. I managed to get seltzer all over my shirt.

After nearly two more hours of shooting baskets, I drove back to Long Island, took a hot bath and got into bed. The following morning I had difficulty lifting my arm to brush my teeth. I intended to go back to the Bronx, but the way my body ached I did not think I could manage to drive. Wearing my T-shirt, dungarees and sneakers, and carrying my basketball, I boarded the Long Island Railroad train to New York, oblivious to the way I looked to the commuters in their shirts and ties.

By the time I reached New York and went into the subway, I was absorbed by the city’s activity. In New York, the sight of a middle-aged man carrying a basketball did not warrant any particular attention. I arrived in the Bronx, walked into the park and started to shoot baskets. I had a specific goal now. I wanted to be able to play in a three-man basketball game with the local kids and still be alive when it was over. To accomplish this, I intended to follow a program of shooting baskets and jogging, my jogging goal was to run around the reservoir near Kingsbridge Road, a mile and a half without stopping, and also without dying.

At the reservoir I started to run ten strides, then walk ten strides, which had been recommended in a jogging book. The book did not include material on resting against the fence. I did a considerable amount of resting against the fence and managed to cover the distance in about forty minutes or a day, I was too tired to tell. Plan A of my program called for another hour of shooting baskets and stretching exercises. I created Plan B, the suspension of activities, the returning to Long Island and the getting into bed. I set the alarm before I went to sleep, and when it rang in the morning, I could not reach up and over for it, I moved my arm a few inches and pulled the plug out of the wall. Plan C. I stayed in bed with a heating pad.

After resting a day, I returned to the reservoir and I started myself off with an “Oh, shit!” I was going to lose that paunch, which I hated. I was gagging for breath, but I was going to get myself into shape. I went to the basketball court and shot baskets with aching arms until I could not lift the ball any longer. I came back every day for two weeks, jogging, doing stretching exercises and shooting baskets. I finally made it around the reservoir at a steady gait. Children passed me, obese women, but I finished.

I infiltrated the teenagers’ game with a standard schoolyard approach, territorial aggression. While they were practicing, I brought my ball over and began shooting baskets at their court. “You playing?” someone asked when six people were on the court. I nodded. “Okay, you got this guy,” he said. I was not even in the game and I was already traded.

They were high-school age, one of them at six feet two was two inches taller than I, the others were assorted heights, the smallest about five feet six. Two were blacks, two Hispanic, one white. They played fast basketball with more physical contact and less team play than I remembered from my days of schoolyard ball. Everyone on the court considered himself a shooter and they were gunning sloppily from all over the court. My reflexes were terrible. I had been practicing shots, I had not been playing, and it took several ball games for me to find a rhythm, but it did not matter—I was lost on the court. I set people up with passes, they did not know how to move without the ball, they only knew how to dribble and shoot, and my passes went out of bounds. I looked for the ball when my teammates were out of position and I was free for a shot, and watched as they took wild jump shots. I stayed there for about two hours as players drifted on and off, I waited for the next game when the team I played with lost, but in every case, whoever won, the result was the same. I was out of the game.

That night I sat in my house on Long Island and analyzed schoolyard basketball games as they were played in the Bronx. I was All-Neighborhood once. I had to be able to compete with these kids. The next day I arrived with a game plan. My high school coach had taught defense to us, playing defense was one of the differences between the average schoolyard ballplayer and someone who had been coached. If I maintained my concentration, I thought I might be able to assert myself with these ballplayers through defense. I started to anticipate, knock the ball away and pick off passes. I became more confident and was slowly becoming a factor on the court. On offense I wanted the ball now, I was as entitled to shoot as they were, and I made a few baskets. In my sixth game, a mad jump shooter named Juan tried the same predictable move three times in a row and I knocked the ball out of his hands each time. The last time, the tips of my fingers lightly grazed his shirt.

“Foul, you mother!” he shouted. “This mother’s been foulin’ me all day.”

“You’re full of it,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah! You didn’t look like you dunked it to me.”

The others on the court supported me, laughing.

“Forget it, Juan,” one of them said. “This guy put you in a box.”

Juan took the ball and slammed it against the backboard and walked off the court. The game was over. I did it. I played in their game and I won.

When I was not jogging or playing ball, I spent much of my time in the neighborhood, reading on park benches. I was in Poe Park, reading, my basketball at my feet, when I heard someone say, “Stevie? Is that you?” I looked up to see a little old man in his seventies with the stub of a cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He wore a sports shirt, white pants with suspenders, and he supported himself with a cane. He was a much-aged version of Sam the bookmaker.

“It’s Sam, Stevie.”

“Sam!”

“I thought it was you,” he said.

I jumped up and hugged him.

“Sam. Sam the Man!”

“I got old, Stevie.”

“It’s so good to see you, Sam!”

“Well, I’m alive. A lot of people are dead, but I’m alive. Moe and Rhoda Fisher—they’re both dead.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Your father?”

“He’s fine. He’s in Florida.”

“The candy store—it’s not the same.”

“I know.”

“And next door they got a pizza place now,” he said. “Two Puerto Rican brothers—they sell Italian pizza. You figure it.”

“It’s pretty good pizza.”

“I’m not allowed to eat it. I’m one slice of pizza away from heaven.”

“Sam!” I said, patting him on the back.

“Okay, gimme the leading scorers for Utah when they won the NIT?”

“Arnie Ferrin and Vern Gardner.”

“Highest scorer, single game, college?”

“Bevo Francis. A hundred thirteen.”

“That’s my Stevie. You could have been a great bookie. I remember you when you were this high. You used to sit in the back of the candy store with comic books, reading with your lips.”

“I’m probably reading with my lips again, Sam.”

“So fill me in—advertising, I remember.”

“It wasn’t working out for me anymore.”

“So?”

“So I travel in every day from Long Island and I hang around.”

“It’s summer. It’s like you’re on vacation, right?”

“People don’t come to the Bronx, Sam. In the travel section of the
Sunday Times
, they don’t advertise the Bronx. Maybe I’ve gone crazy.”