40th Street (Cont. # 12)

A medical emergency, and more, in Borough Park, Brooklyn, circa 1949


XV: Skippy

When I awoke late at night screaming in pain, my parents knew to knock on the door of our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Eton, to use their phone to call a taxi. We didn’t have a phone then. It was 1949, and I, at seven years old, had just shown the symptom that our doctor, who had visited our home on 40th Street earlier that day, warned my parents about. In those days, doctors carried a small black bag and made house calls. He had given me medicine for a pain on the right side of my belly that I had been complaining of. Then he told my parents that if I awoke at night, screaming, to send me right away to the hospital. He said that it might be more than a stomach ache.

At first that day, my parents, especially my father, didn’t even want to call the doctor. He was sure that all my complaining was probably about nothing more than an ordinary stomach ache. And that it would go away if we just let it alone. He said it with a tone of annoyance, if not disgust. At my being such a cry baby.

But the pain didn’t go away, and I didn’t stop crying. So eventually they called our doctor. Who said my pain might indicate a ruptured appendix.

On the operating table, the doctors or somebody put a mask on my face and gave me ether. Of course I didn’t know what ether was at the time; I didn’t know anything, except that I was on a table or something and somebody put a mask on my face and I was in the black sky with a million stars and I was falling falling down into nothingness. And in that black nothingness was the horrible smell, which I recall as a combination of menthol and rancid split pea soup. And I was falling downward forever in the sickening blackness.

I guess that was a dream, although it didn’t feel like one. A dream was supposed to be different. Like a dream in which I had a pet dog, which I always wanted but couldn’t have. Because my mother said she hated dogs. She was afraid of them, she said, and dogs ruined furniture, and were dirty. And the last thing she needed was to clean up after it.

Anyway, after the falling-in-the-black-sky dream, I awoke in a strange white bed and had to go to the bathroom. But I didn’t know where I was, until some girl told me I was in the hospital. She was maybe two or so years older than me, or at least she was much taller than me, which I could see even though both of us were lying down. She was in a white bed, just like mine. In an all-white room with white walls. She said I could use the bedpan that was under the bed. Or I could call a nurse who would help me get to a bathroom. I felt I couldn’t wait, so I reached down and then peed in the bedpan. But I was embarrassed, because she saw me peeing. So I closed my eyes and pretended. . . . I don’t remember what I pretended. Maybe that I wasn’t there.

The following day, the girl in the bed next to mine was sitting up and sucking her thumb. She was nine years old, I found out later, two years older than me, and sucking her thumb. That made me very scared, but I can’t say why. Maybe I thought that I would become just like her, a thumb-sucker. But that’s only what I surmise now, thinking back. At the time, I just wanted her to stop sucking her thumb. But she wouldn’t, and I stayed scared.

So when my mother came to visit me later in the day, I cried and cried and pleaded with her to take me home. She said she couldn’t until a few days later. But I kept crying, so to get me to stop, she promised that if I were a good boy, and stopped crying, she would get me a pet dog when I got home.

Certainly, that was a big thing for her.

When I got home, sure enough, there was the dog. I fell in love immediately, and called him Skippy. I didn’t know what “breed” he was; in fact, I didn’t know there were breeds. Let alone what breeds meant. Today when I check page after page of dog pictures on Google, I can never find Skippy. Maybe he was something called an American Staffordshire Terrier. Or a German Pinscher. Or a Jack Russel Terrier. Or a mutt.

Tawny, like a lion. Playful, like a friend. Excited, like a little boy just like me.

All I knew was, Skippy was my dog. I wanted like anything to take him outside for a walk. But I'd have to wait, because I had to stay indoors for two weeks, doctor's orders. Every day, for the next two weeks, all I could think of was taking Skippy for a walk.

Then the big day arrived. I could go outside, because the jagged scar on the right side of my belly, where my ruptured appendix had been, was healing. I couldn’t wait to take my dog for a walk. I was so excited I could hardly think.

That morning, my mother said she had to go to the grocery store, and would take Skippy with her. When she got home, she said, I could take Skippy out myself. About a half hour later, she came back.

Without Skippy.

Where’s Skippy? I asked. She said he was probably stolen. She said she had placed his leash on the doorknob of the grocery store before she went in to buy stuff. When she came out, he was gone. She said she looked up and down the block, calling his name, but she couldn’t find him. She said she saw a truck driving away, and she was convinced that the truck driver had seen what a beautiful dog Skippy was and stole him and drove away. She said she was so sorry. So so sorry.

Children, especially very young children, tend to accept as truth whatever they are told. So for some years afterwards, I used to think that someday I would find that truck driver and kill him and get my dog back. Only sometimes, in the back of my brain, I remembered how much my mother had hated dogs. And that she saw how much I was attached to Skippy.

Which in her mind, I think now—I really think now—she experienced as a detraction from my attachment to her.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was the truck driver.

* * *

40th Street (Cont. #11)

A Christmas/Hanukah tale in Borough Park, Brooklyn, circa 1949.

XIV: Two houses

Leonard, a friend in the second grade, asked me where my Christmas tree was. We were in my home on 40th Street, the population of which consisted almost entirely of working class Jews and Italians. I told him we didn’t have a Christmas tree, we had candles.

“So where do you put your presents? Do you just put ’em on the floor?”

Since we didn’t do presents at Hanukah, at least not like Italians like Leonard did at Christmas, I answered that I could beat him at punchball.

Cannot, he said.

Can too, I said.

Cannot! he said. Then he said he didn’t care, he just wanted to know where we put our presents.

“Anyway,” I said, “we have more holidays than you so ha ha you have to go to school more than we do ha ha ha!”

“I’m gonna ask your mother.” He walked into the kitchen, where my mother was making chopped liver sandwiches on white bread.

“Nathan’s mother,” he asked, “where do you put your Christmas presents?”

In Leonard’s house, there was a tree. It had snow on it, and silver, and diamonds and gold and pure jewels and it was even good for when you catch a cold. Leonard told me that if you smell the branches you get rid of your cold.

In my house, when you had a cold you had to smell something disgusting like Vicks vaporub.

In Leonard’s house there were a million presents under the tree.

In my house there was only a menorah with nine candles, one for each day when Jews were fighting bad people and God made a miracle because there was only oil for one day but God made it last for eight days and He made one candle to light all the other candles. And there weren’t a million presents. Maybe, sometimes, one present. That was brought by my aunt Bella from Philadelphia. “Here, put it under the Hanukah bush,” she’d say. But I didn’t know what a Hanukah bush was, and anyway we didn’t have one.

In Leonard’s house there were two Jesus Christs, the baby Jesus Christ and the grownup Jesus Christ, and they were both God.

In my house God was an old man who had a beard and looked like Moses.

Leonard said that if you were very religious you couldn’t say Jesus Christ.

I said that if you were very religious the only thing you couldn't say was God, but you could say Jesus Christ.

In Leonard’s house on Christmas morning everybody would be in pyjamas and open all the presents and the red and green and orange and blue lights that looked like warm stars going on and off and the turkey when it wasn’t even Thanksgiving and the whole room laughing.

In my house we would just hang around like always until evening, when--sometimes--there would be a meal of flank steak, which we calld flanken. And potato pancakes called latkes that my mother made by rubbing potatoes over a piece of jagged metal that had sharp funny-shaped holes in it. She always cut her fingers on the holes. It was just a regular old day in spite of the candles, and Leonard was so lucky that I vowed to never again let him into my house.

Leonard walked into the living room, eating a chopped liver sandwich.

“Wanna play dray-dul?” he asked.

* * *

40th Street (Cont. #10)

More 1950s Borough Park, Brooklyn stuff.

XIII: Liar

Arnie lied.

He was the best-looking guy on the block. And the best athlete, at least in stickball and punchball and handball. One day in the summer of 1957, he knocked on my door, which was at the end of a long dark hallway, to tell me he was going to Mexico with his parents, and that he would find a beautiful sixteen-year-old señorita--we were all fifteen or sixteen--and would get laid. Since none of us had actually gotten laid yet, and since we all knew that Arnie was the best-looking guy, with his black hair and naturally physically great body, that we all wished we had, and that all the girls like Claire and Rebecca and Dina and all of them were crazy about, and that we all hated, we believed him.

He would be the first of us to get laid.

So he came back, after the vacation with his parents (who had run a hot dog stand in Coney Island and, later, a dry cleaning service on East 2nd Street), and told us he did it. Jealousy, inferiority, hate, admiration--all that crap, that’s what I felt. Probably all the guys on 40th Street felt that.

Until later, maybe a few months later, when Selvin, who was Arnie’s best friend, told us he knew that Arnie lied. He’d never gotten laid. He was lying.

I can’t tell you how good I felt.

So when Arnie later said he was going on a date with Claire, who lived across the street from me and who was small and had dark hair and a beautiful face and who I was silently crazy about, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t actually call him a liar, but I thought it. And laughed and laughed inside.

Soon after, on a Saturday night, at about eleven o’clock, I left my apartment, walked through the hallway, and opened the door to the outside. I looked across the street. My stomach dropped. There was Arnie, talking to Claire. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I saw them both laughing.

Which meant that this time, he hadn't been lying.

My head felt on fire.

After a few minutes, I saw them reach out their hands to each other. They stayed that way for awhile. Then they parted hands, and Arnie started to leave. After walking a few feet, he turned and waved, and Claire waved back. Both were still smiling. Then Claire went upstairs to her apartment, and Arnie walked down 40th Street and around the corner to his.

And my head stayed on fire. For a very, very long time.

* * *

40th Street (Cont. #9)

Continuing the Borough Park, Brooklyn saga.


XII: Tatoo

The front door to the Chaim Nachman Bialik Folk Shul, the Hebrew school I went to, located in a storefront on 16th Avenue, was locked that Sunday, and no one had the key. So my friend Jay and I, who were twelve years old and studying the old Hebrew or Aramaic Haftorah we had to memorize—the singing as well as the words themselves—to perform at our forthcoming bar mitzvahs, decided that the only thing to do was to go around the block to the back, climb over a fence, walk through an alley, and pry open the back window. Then we could unlock the front door from the inside.

With us was our Sunday teacher, a small, thin retiring man, perhaps in his early forties. He’s the one who taught us the text, all the stuff to say--actually, to sing--at the ceremony where we would be transformed, just like that, from boys to men. He didn't want to wait at the front door; he wanted to come with us.

After scaling the small fence, we had to climb over various obstacles to get to the back window: wooden crates, one or two garbage cans, tossed household goods. Not to mention all the rubbish on the ground. It was easy for me and Jay, but I bet it was not easy for the teacher. Because, after all, he was getting old, in his forties.

I pried open the window, and scrambled inside. Then I looked out the window at him and asked, in a kind of boastful manner, if he had ever been able to climb over stuff like this before. Or if this was the hardest thing he had ever done in his whole life. Which I was sure it was.

He smiled at me, standing there in the refuse-strewn alley. Then he pushed up the sleeve on one of his arms. He showed me a strange tattoo. It wasn’t anything like tattoos are supposed to be, like a heart or a dragon or a girlfriend’s name. It was nothing but numbers. Small blue numbers, all in a row. I just looked at it, wondering at such a weird tattoo. Also, tattoos were supposed to be only for big burly guys, not little guys. So I looked at him, questioning with my eyes.

“I escaped from a Nazi camp,” he said, softly. “This alley isn’t so hard for me.”

Then he climbed through the window, and thanked me and Jay for opening up the shul so we could study Haftorah.

* * *

40th Street (Cont. #8)

More about growing up in Borough Park, Brooklyn.


XI: Pitcher

The counselor told me that that was a good pitch. I had just made a good pitch.

We were playing softball at the Kinderweldt (pronounced kinderveldt) summer camp, in upstate Accord, New York, where I went for a few weeks one summer at the age of eight, or maybe nine, courtesy of charity from the Brooklyn Hebrew school I attended: the Chaim Nachman Bialik Folk Shul, on 47th Street and 16th Avenue.

I loved what the counselor said, because I always felt that I was lousy in every sport—in every thing—I did. It’s not that I was a poor athlete as a result of being overweight, or anything, or slow moving. Or clumsy. Actually, I was small and agile and skinny, maybe too skinny, which is why my mother used to refer to me as “skinny-marink-a-dink-a-dink,” and then laugh (or maybe just grin) because that was so funny. Also, if anything, I was too fast-moving, which is why so many people told me I should learn to calm down and relax and not be so impatient. Just relax, kid, they’d say. I didn’t know what they meant. I still don’t, sort of.

I felt I was lousy in everything because that’s what I was told, or made to believe, pretty much, by my father. Like I’d show him a drawing that I did, when, maybe, he’d be reclining on the couch, reading. His “comment” was a grunt and a wave of his hand, as one waves away a pesky mosquito.

See, once—before he got a job packing crates at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—he had been an artist, having gone to art school, where he met my mother, who had also been an artist. So if he didn’t think my drawing was any good, it wasn’t.

So then I’d show it to my mother, who--especially if she was entering one of her unstable moods--would say it was excellent, unbelievable, great, terrific, so beautiful it should be in a museum. “Oh Harry,” she’d call out from the kitchen to my father, who was lying on the couch in the living room, “look what Nathan did, it’s so beautiful I can’t believe it”. . . .on and on, unreal, increasingly bizarre, her "praise" having less and less to do with what I actually drew, until her response meant nothing. My father dismissed my drawing directly, my mother dismissed it indirectly, by glorifying it, crazily, reflecting yet another sinking step into her impending psychotic break (one of several during those years).

So back to the pitcher stuff. It was at camp, and somehow I was asked to be the pitcher for my team. Maybe somebody--a counselor, a director--said he thought I should try out as a pitcher. So I did, and I became the pitcher.

This is how I pitched. I'd stand at the pitcher's mound, leaning forwards slightly, staring at the batter. Then I'd step forward with my left leg, at the same time whirling my right arm in a kind of double-arc around my head and back down to my side and slightly up again. The ball flew, as if by its own accord, out of my hand. When it neared the batter, he would swing, and miss. Or hit a foul. Or hit a pop fly, which one of my team mates could easily catch.

When I did that a few times, the counselor said to me that that was a good pitch. You're a good pitcher, he said. I felt so swelled up I could burst.

And something even better happened. At the end of camping season, I was given a cloth decal, a round patch that looked like a softball, which said "pitcher" on it, along with the name of the camp. An award. A prize, that everybody in the world could see!

So when the bus from camp got back to Brooklyn, I held the decal tightly and sped up the stairs at 1546 40th Street and ran right into my apartment, where my father was lying on the couch, reading. I showed him the decal. "I won this," I said, breathless. "I was the pitcher."

My father glanced at what I was holding, grunted, and went on reading.

So I stood there a second or two. Or maybe longer. Then I went into the kitchen to show it to my mother and ask her to sew it onto my jacket. She was in a good--that is, sane--mood.

"Harry," she called out, "did you see what Nathan won?"

No comment from the living room.

"Harry?" my mother called again.

After a moment or two my father replied. "I'm sure they give those out to all the kids," he said. Then he went back to reading.

* * *

"Avatar" and its conservative critics

There appears to be no dearth of heated commentary on “Avatar,” James Cameron’s futuristic film that is taking the movie-going public by storm. Herewith my two cents: It is an intensely political film, notwithstanding Cameron’s later downplaying the politics of it. It is anti-imperialist, pro-ecological, and highly critical of capitalism’s world view. All of which is for the best.

To sum the story: a human (read U.S.) military and scientific expedition to Pandora, a mind-bogglingly lush world with beautiful humanoid inhabitants, is undertaken to extract from that world an invaluable mineral, unobtainium, an energy superconductor. To avoid the expense and discomfort of traditional mining, however, the humans would like to blast away vast areas of the planet’s surface to release the mineral.

But the expedition’s leaders do not really want to slaughter the tall, blue-skinned striped humanoids, known as Na’vi, in the process. Not because they care about protecting those people (who are so superior they not only live in balance with plants and animals, but communicate from afar with each other, when in danger, without technology, given the structure of their beings and, indeed, the ecology of their planet). Rather, it’s because genocide tends to foster a negative press, which makes investors unhappy. Of course, there is something investors dislike even more than a bad image—and this is stated explicitly: a financial statement showing a decline in profits or, God forbid, a loss.

So scientists on the mission have developed a system in which some of the marines can become Avatars, that is, duplicates of themselves but in Na’vi form. The aim is to identify with the Na’vi, learn their culture from the inside, win their confidence, and persuade them to leave certain areas of their homeland which, alas, have to be blasted for the profitable mineral. If it doesn’t work, the marines will have no choice but to go in with their super weapons, and shock and awe (yes, that phrase too is used) the natives. Whom they eventually refer to as terrorists.

I won’t go into any more detail about this astounding film. Technically and esthetically, I think it is easily a match for Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter films. Politically, the message is clear as air: As soon as the expedition’s CEO holds up a sample of unobtainium, the image of the U.S. invasion of Iraq comes to mind. (Of course when we invaded, we claimed a defensive reason: weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist; a revenge reason: for 911, in which Sadam Hussein's Iraq played no part; and a quasi-benevolent reason: to bestow the blessings of democracy. Does anyone still hold to that nonsense?) Unobtainium, clearly, is a metaphor for oil, and the Na’vi are the inhabitants of a land in which it is plentiful, as was Iraq.

To be sure, some observers see unobtainium as a metaphor for coal, and Pandora as a version of a once-lush Appalachia. That rings true, but it doesn’t negate the anti-imperialist argument; if Pandora is Appalachia, then its devastation for coal is an example of domestic imperialism. Others see the Na’vi as reflecting the early Native Americans and that, too is no contradiction.

Anyway, the anti-imperialist message is so strong, so powerful—not simplistic--that some leading conservative columnists must have felt it imperative to turn the message upside down, and condemn the movie for, of all things, serving as a racist justification of the imperialist “white man’s burden!” (This is bitter irony: not too long ago, the right was largely defined by its justification of imperialism and white racism.)

See, for example, David Brock’s NY Times column in which he writes “[The film’s message] rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.”

There is so much malarky in this argument it’s hard to know where to begin. First, the film does not portray the natives as only “spiritual and athletic” in contrast to the rational white (human, American) invaders. In addition to their spiritualism, the Na’vi are portrayed as intellectually advanced—so far beyond humans that they can communicate with each other without a separate technology, as shown during the war against the invaders. Further, they are hardly illiterate: they have their own language, and some have learned the invaders' language. Nor are the invaders--you and me--presented as unspiritual: they too believe in their God, even as they sneer at the Na'vi deity.

Second, the invaders themselves are presented as highly “athletic”—fast moving, physically powerful, with the well-sculpted bodies and stamina common to marines.

Third, the Na’vi are not presented as needing any White Messiah to lead their “crusades,” since they have no crusades. What they do have is an invasion by a military superpower, against which their weapons are not much of a match. This is hardly fable; it is history. Think back a few generations to England's invasions of India and North America, or to Spain's invasions of South America, or to France's invasions of Africa and Haiti--all with their superior arms. Indeed, think of any land the Europeans conquered, and of any the US conquered. This is fact, not fantasy.

But "Avatar" is, after all, a fantasy movie. So in it, a human with the skills and knowledge of human weaponry turns against his "race," thereby helping the Na'vi reinforce their native weaponry. Does this reflect a pathetic guilt complex, as conservatives argue? Claptrap. It reflects awareness: Wouldn't it have been nice had any of those Europeans or Americans turned around and actually saw, with horror, what their countrymen were doing? And then used their countrymen's own technology to defeat those invaders? Not guilt, but courage, heroism.

And finally, the Na’vi are not at all depicted as “supporting actors in our journey to [human] self-admiration.” How anybody who actually sees the movie can emerge with a sense of self-admiration is beyond me. At most, at the end of the film, very few humans, a tiny handful, are accepted by the Na’vi as decent. Humans in general are presented as imperial, greedy destroyers, and are eventually sent off back to their home world. This hardly reflects self-admiration, let alone a white "guilt complex;" it reflects a long overdue awareness of our own history.

Hopefully, this film will generate at least some feelings of disgust at what we have been, and what so many of us, or at least our political and economic leaders, are today. And how we might change. But don’t hold your breath.

* * *

40th Street (Cont. #7)

A recollection of an incident in my Borough Park, Brooklyn, elementary school, which during the 1950s ran through the sixth grade.

X: Miss Levy

From the time I entered first grade, Miss Levy, the assistant principal, was the terror of Public School 164, the standard factory-like school building on 14th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. She was about two hundred years old, heavy, plodding, and wore a wig the color of dog poop. She wasn’t only the terror of students; much later, we learned, or heard, that teachers feared her as well.

I don’t know if she ever hit any kids; she might have, since corporal punishment was not off limits in those days. Truth is, she didn’t have to. She could inject fear into you merely by her presence.

But she would rarely announce her presence. Instead, while a class was in progress, she would simply enter the room. No prior notice to the teacher or the students. The teacher would stop, turn to look at her, then nod. Miss Levy would walk to the back of the classroom and stand, staring at the teacher. Who then, being “monitored,” would try to continue teaching as if her classroom were still hers.

I was known to my teachers then as, well, restless. What that meant was that I had a hard time sitting still, silent, with my hands clasped in front of me for too long--more than a few minutes at a time. I’d whisper to classmates. Like to Kenny about how come, if he was Italian, he wasn’t Catholic? (He said he was Protestant.) Or to Harriet, who once said to me she’d show me her thing if I showed her my thing. I said yes, so we did, when the teacher wasn’t looking. Anyway, I talked and talked about lots of things, when I was supposed to behave and be quiet and listen to the teacher. (Today, most likely, I’d be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and pumped up with drugs.)

So one day, in the third grade, when the teacher was facing the board, and Miss Levy was in the back of the classroom, I leaned over to whisper to someone. A sound like nothing I’d ever heard before shot out from the back of the room straight to the back of my head.

“THAT CHILD!”

I froze.

“THAT CHILD!”

I turned around, my eyes so wide they threatened to take over the rest of my face.

“COME HEAH!”

I stood up, shaking, and walked to the back of the room. Straight to Miss Levy. Who grabbed my right arm and, without saying a word to the teacher whose day she had just disrupted, led me—utterly terrorized—to the door, out into the hallway, and down the stairs to her office.

I don't recall what she said to me. It was probably some lecture about “paying attention.” Or about the difference between being good and being bad. Something like that. Whatever she said, I nodded and nodded. After her admonitions, she had me sit outside her office in the hallway. She stayed inside, and wrote a note to my mother about the importance of teaching me to behave in class.

In the hallway, I was seated on a bench a few yards away from a desk. On it was a typewriter. I had heard about typewriters. You could use them to write things, just like the way writing looked in a book. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter. I stared at it a moment, then made a decision. I slid off the bench, walked over to the desk, and looked at the paper. Nothing was written on it. So then I pressed the following keys: f, u, c, and k.

Then I walked back to the bench and sat down, and waited for Miss Levy. She emerged from her office, handing me a note to my mother in an envelope, and warned me that I had better show it to her, and had better learn to behave. I nodded. Then she let me go back upstairs to my classroom.

* * *