My ealriest
childhood memories are of a rough, blue-collar neighborhood in an older quarter
of Yonkers, New York. We were squeezed between Riverdale Avenue and the
railroad tracks that coursed along the Hudson. Both avenue and railway were
there to ferry people past our poor domain to, or from, New York City.
Riverdale Avenue ran into the ritzy section of the Bronx after which the road
was named. The railway ran south to places
that carried exotic names such as Spuyten Duyvel (pronounced spy-ten dye-vel)
or north past Yonkers Station to Tarrytown, Peekskill and Poughkeepsie. It was
a small world. My world was smaller still. As a toddler, it was restricted to
our house, the backyard, and the street immediately in front of our modest
property.
The street was a
dangerous place. The kids in the neighborhood were unschooled in that sense of
morality expressed in the phrase, “Jeez, leave the little kid alone, why
dontcha?”. When I was about four years old, I made the mistake of wandering out
onto the sidewalk in front of our house unescorted by my mother. Some kid of
ten to twelve years spotted me. It was like a wolf spotting a newborn lamb that
had got separated from the fold. Studying me, he removed a Y-shaped device from
his pocket, fumbled for something on the ground, and then drew back fully the
thick rubber band that had been somehow attached to the Y-shaped object’s
uprights. It was a slingshot, and he was carefully and calmly taking aim
directly at my face from about ten feet away. I had no idea what he was doing,
and watched intently as the lad drew a bead. He let fly. The pebble struck me
in the chin just at my lip, slightly to left. It hurt pretty bad, but I was so
startled that I didn’t cry at first but instead stood there wondering at what
had happened to me. The boy obviously had been looking for me to run away
screaming in pain and was somewhat disappointed in my subdued response. He then
scrabbled about on the ground looking for another missle and chose a larger one
this time. It dawned on me at that point that this kid had done something to me
that was none too pleasant and was preparing to do it again, so I beat a hasty retreat to my house. He
shot the larger rock at me as I fled, but I was out of range.
Why would a
twelve year old kid shoot a tiny four year old in the face with a slingshot? I
guess I simply looked like an easy victim. I was nothing to him aside from
that. He didn’t hate me. He wasn’t angry at me. He was just your standard urban
street punk, doing what street punks did in those days. I saw him a few times
after that. Each time he recognized me, smiled, and drew the slingshot from his
pocket, displaying it for me. He did not need to prepare to shoot. I played my
part by fleeing at a gallop each time. This amused him.
There is no moral
for this story. The boy was never apprehended for his crime, never got his comeuppance. He wasn’t around
when my father was home, and he was older and bigger than my older brother. So
went the earliest year of my recollections. About a year after that
incident, we moved to a far more placid
neighborhood in North Yonkers. This was a land of lawn sprinklers and
birdbaths, portulacas and hollyhocks, see-saws and swing sets. Here I made new
friends and settled in to what would be a largely safe and sane childhood. My
scary old world, with its street bullies and lack of rules of safety, receded
from my life as though I had left it thousands of miles away, across a great
ocean. It was the Old World, I was now safely ensconced in the New.
One of the new
friends I made was named John, as I was, although I was known to all by my
childhood nickname “Toby”. He was referred to formally as John by child and
adult alike. His last name was Blumenau. I can’t recall how I met him. He
didn’t live on my street, which was at the top of a steep hill. He live the
next street down on the southside of the same hill in a house that was newer,
but smaller than mine. It may be that my parents, and his, somehow arranged for
me to spend time over at his house as he was rarely let out alone.
John’s parents –
or at least his father – were very strict. His father, in fact, was a royal
pain in the neck. John’s entire day was arranged on a schedule. Often, when I
was at John’s poring with John over his many books, his father would appear in the door of John’s bedroom just as
John and I were really enjoying ourselves. He would announce “Is time you go!
John must study!” And that would be that. John always had to study and I had
learned that it was no use to ask Mr. Blumenau for more time – a lesson John
had no doubt learned some time before. What was queer about all this was that
what we did in John’s bedroom was studying, sort of. We played with books. John
had books instead of toys. Many were great books with illustrations of animals,
buildings in far-off countries, strange looking people, and so forth. He had
encyclopedias. One game we played was for one of us to take an encyclopedia
volume down, open it randomly, and read
off the heading to the nearest entry. The other would then have to explain
something about the subject. “Lisbon”, I would say, reading from the “L”
volume. John would answer “Capital of Portugal”. I would have to read aloud
through the passage until what he said was either verified or disproved. Then,
we would switch off. John was ‘way
better than me at this game.
Mr. Blumenau’s
strict oversight of John’s behavior
also applied when John was allowed to
go outside and play games with the rest of the neighborhood kids. At those
games, John was not so good. The
neighborhood boys’ idea of playing was to dive headfirst into the woods which
still existed in those parts in those days and role around – depending on the
weather -- in the mud or the dust. We
played war. World War II, to be specific. We fought the Japs and the “Heinies”,
always bravely if not always prevailing. My favorite war game was one in which
we were wiped out by an overwhelming, superior enemy force. Gallantly, we
dropped one by one, fighting to the last bullet for God, Country, Right Reason,
and to enable a Suffering Mankind to move forward in future into broad, sunlit
uplands. I was particularly good at dying bravely in some fantastically heroic
manner, sacrificing myself for my fellow soldiers. With courage above and
beyond the call of any conceivable duty,
I would make a solitary foray against the evil Japs. Leaving the
relative safety of our fortified position, I broke forward into open, exposed
ground with a loud battle cry. Emptying the clip of my fence-post rifle and
tossing my last dirt-bomb grenade, I was
soon patched by enemy machine gun fire. Willingly, I died buying
precious time for my dear comrades in the wan hope that reinforcements would
arrive to save the day. Often, upon my demise, my friends would cheat and find
some way to win the battle. They would charge forward, past my mangled corpse,
and put the run to the nefarious Japanese “monkeys”. They would then award
themselves a unit citation for their incredible valor, while I had to lay there
inert and be dead.
John couldn’t
really play in these games, and he was no good at it anyway. “Pretend” was not
in his vocabulary. One of the most important skills in warfare – or our version
of it -- was the ability to make a
noise imitating gunfire. One could not merely say “bang” or “wham”, that is the
stuff of comic books, not real combat.
You needed to invent a trade-mark sound of battle. My favorite was a sort of snarl that
resembled a noise an angry leopard might make – a hint of tearing cloth mixed
with a rasping, modulated wheeze. My
friend Ray used a truncated grunt, low and menacing. Bob, who lived across the
street from John, produced a repeated pa-pa-pa
which strikes me today as quite realistically resembling the sound of
gunfire heard from a distance. John’s
pathetic attempt at a rifle report, however, produced a sound reminiscent of
clearing one’s throat prior to asking to be excused to the bathroom. It was so
bad that we issued him a dispensation and allowed him to say “pow” when he fired
what passed for his rifle. This brings up his problems in securing decent
ordnance in the first place. John, like the rest of us, had no toy rifle with
which to fight. We all had to create our own weapons out of available sticks
and lumber. I had found and fought many battles with a piece of picket fence.
It had the very great virtue of having a pointed end resmbling a bayonet. This
probably explains my penchant for tilting at enemy machine-gun nests –- a
bayonet just lends itself to charging. John’s guns were any old twig he could
find. Often his government issue US M1 still had leaves growing on it as he
took up his position in our order of battle. His position was invariably far to
the rear.
It didn’t take
long for John to get himself drummed
out of the corps on a section eight. He was not cut out for soldiery. His parents overdressed him. Often, he
went into battle wearing a spotless
white shirt, pressed pants and shined leather shoes. Once, they sent him out to
play wearing a bowtie. Jeez, a stinking bowtie! He was not allowed to
sullly his tidy clothing.Woe betide him should any of his wardrobe be in less
than perfect condition when he returned home, which he often had to do right in
mid-battle. He was on a strict schedule, and he was the only kid his age I ever
saw who wore a wrist watch. I don’t
even recall if I knew how to tell time in those days, and I’m certain that Ray
didn’t know the big hand from the little hand.
One day I was
sitting in John’s room going over the Wonder Book of Natural History with
him when his mother opened the door. His father wasn’t home that day, which was
a relief. While John’s father was big, loud, and overbearing, his mother was a
small, birdlike woman, pleasant to behold. She was always dressed the way my
mother dressed when she went to church on Sunday. She wore lipstick and her
blonde hair was tied back of her head in a neat bun. She was pretty. Mrs.
Blumenau smiled at me politely and then turned to John and made a bunch of
weird but intriguing noises at him. At first I thought that she had gone crazy
or something, but then I realized that she was speaking in some foreign
language. Like Mr. Blumenau, Mrs. Blumenau spoke English with an accent. As a
kid, I just accepted this as idiosyncratic. Insofar as I thought about it all,
I guess I realized that at some time in the past they spoke another language
and the funny way they talked related to that. But I had never heard anything
like these noises that she was making. I had heard the barbers in the shop a few
blocks away jabber in Italian every time I got my hair cut. They seemed to have
a running argument in Italian that had lasted for years. I always arrived at
their tonsorial establishment in the middle of it, and the issue was yet
unresolved when I left. That, and the Latin spoken in church, were my only
experiences with foreign languages. Latin was formal, holy, and full of
mystery. The barbers were just somehow goofy. The Italian they spoke was a
bouncy jumble of silly noises like pachamulaca
and bunchagajinga. Now, here I
was in my best friend’s room listening to his mother speaking in a series of
incomprehensible syllables – hard, clipped, and nasal. She had to show her
teeth to speak this stuff. It was clearly not Italian. It sounded like zatsfreek
gashimben and goopnock-sockanow. And then John answered in a set of
his own similar blather. This was a shock. John could talk in some other
language!
When his mother
left, I asked him what in the world was it that he and his mother were talking?
“German”, he answered indifferently. German! It beggared the
imagination. John Blumenau and his mother could talk the language of the bad
guys we were always fighting in the wars that raged through our neighborhood
each Saturday morning. Holy smoke! It was the first time I had ever heard real,
live German. “You mean you’re all from Germany?”, I asked, scarcely able to
believe it. “I was born here. My mother and father came from Germany.”, he
replied. In response to another question, he said he didn’t know why they came
here. He seemed uncomfortable with the conversation. I wanted to learn German.
Maybe John could teach me?
“I can’t, my
father doesn’t want us to speak German, but my mother likes to when my father’s
not here. Don’t say anything about it.”
“Well, … why doesn’t he want you guys to
speak German?”
“I don’t know.”
Something told me
to drop the subject. Maybe John just did not want it to become generally known.
I knew several kids whose parents spoke accented English. They always seemed
embarrassed by their parents. Years after this, for example, when I was walking
along with a teen-queen acquaintance named Angela Manzinu. As we walked along,
and old man approached us marching forward with the aid of a cane. He stopped
and let us approach and then started to jabber in Portuguese to Angela. She
answered in Portuguese. Wow! Angie could speak Portuguese! I had not known this
and was duly impressed. But Angie was clearly mortified. She turned beet red as
she was forced to speak Portuguese in front of me. The old man turned out to be
her grandfather. She begged me to tell nobody. Kids hate to be seen as
different in any way.
Different. Poor
old John Blumenau was the neighborhood distributor for “different”. Inevitably,
we drifted apart. John, in fact, lost all of his chums in the neighborhood. His
father became increasingly difficult to deal with over the years. He was
convinced we were stealing rocks from
his rock garden. He felt we maltreated
Johnny. Indeed, John came in for more than his share of teasing because of his
odd manner of dress and inability to fit in. The last time I called on John
Blumenau was on Hallowe’en sometime in the late 1950’s. We knocked on his front
door. John’s father opened the door. Dressed in our costumes, we asked for
John. Mr. Blumenau erupted in a series
of loud, bellowed and inarticulate threats which came out partly in German and partly in English. I
guess he did not understand Hallowe’en.
We ran off into the crisp fall night, my friend Ray, running backward,
thought to ask “So John’s not going trick-or-treating?”
Mr. Blumenau’s
offenses, of course, carried their own punishments. As time went on and we got
older, we treated Mr. Blumenau pretty badly for being the neighborhood grouch.
We did steal rocks from his rock garden. We put trash in his milkbox. We turned
his garden hose on when he wasn’t home, flooding his precious flowers – once,
we put the hose into a basement window which he had carelessly left open and
flooded his basement for him. Johnny Blumenau? We just ignored him altogether
and he disappeared from our life.
One day, I
believe I was about eleven years old, I was heading home from school and passed
Mr. Blumenau’s house. He was out in his garden, counting his rocks. “You!
Lockvood!” he shouted, “I know vot you do! I giff your fadder a rink!” I had
not done anything to Mr. Blumenau. This was just the usual routine with him.
Some kid had stolen his newspaper or put dog-doo in his mail box and he was
going to call every parent in the neighborhood on the telephone and browbeat
them over it. Everyone had come to ignore him. But I was in no mood that day, I
guess. I found myself shouting back at
him, “Go back where you came from you stinking Nazi! Go back to Germany! You
can’t even talk English right! I bet even the lousy Krauts don’t want you back!” Amazingly, instead of going off on a real apoplectic fit, he just
stood there staring at me and said nothing. That got him good. I went home feeling pretty good about myself.
The following day
was Saturday. That morning my father came up to the finshed attic bedroom I
shared with my older brother and woke me up. My brother had already got up and
left for somewhere or other. “Mr. Blumenau called last night” said Dad. I
started to protest that I hadn’t done anything to Mr. Blumenau and he was just
blaming me for some stupid thing because I happened to come along at the
moment, and so on. Dad stopped me. “Let me tell you something about Mr.
Blumenau”, he said. Dad then went on to say that Mr. Blumenau had led a
difficult life. He had his own business in Europe and had been an important man. Then, bad people came
along and took everything away from him because they didn’t like his religion.
They chased him out of his country and he had to come here and start over. “I
want you to promise never to argue or talk back to Mr. Blumenau again. Can I
have your word on that?” My father had never asked me for my word on anything
before. I had never even imagined that I had a word to give. This was the first
time that my father talked to me as though I were an adult, or at least a
future adult. I gave him my word, and kept it.
Years later, I
saw John for the last time. I was on a bus one morning riding by the public
high school, which I did not attend, when I spied Johnny Blumenau heading
fearfully onto the high school grounds. He was dressed just like a Middle
European youth heading into Gymnasium. He was so dressed no doubt on the
orders of his father. He had on a bowtie and wore a beret on his head. Dressed
like that going into that school, he might as well have been wearing a sign
around his neck saying “Abuse Me”. I had heard that John, as a consequence of
his peculiarities, was marked for special treatment by some of the tough kids
at the school and that his father was constantly fighting with school officials
over the maltreatment of his son. I felt very sad that day as I watched my old
friend cross that schoolyard, heading for trouble.
I had been
fortunate to leave behind the street-bully world I had lived in as a little
boy. I could scarcely recall it as a kid, and can scarcely recall it today. But
Mr. Blumenau never escaped 1930’s Mittel Europa. His household was to
him a Jewish ghetto and our
neighborhood a hostile goyish Germany. He peopled it with imaginary
Hitler youth and brownshirts. Then he inflicted it on his son and wife.
The last time I
saw Mr. Blumenau was when I was in my late twenties and was driving through the
old neighborhood. He still lived in that same modest house. He was out in his
European style garden, his home now surrounded by European style six-foot
hedges. He was counting the rocks in his rock garden. He wore a beret. I had heard that his wife had died some
years before.
He looked old,
and German, and beaten down by life.
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July 4, 2005