Eilon, August 4, 2004

Hello Peter and Claudia

Our congratulations on the birth of your grandson! Thanks also for the photos. As you probably know, Ami also became a father this week. Enclosed is a recent photo of Debby and I in Jaffa. Also enclosed is a recent story. -Barry

One of the Gang

Those who know me would be astonished to learn that I was once part of a gang. Known more for my pacifism and for searching for ways to negotiate solutions, I was not always what I appeared to be; shy, withdrawn [if exposed to too much light] and quiet. So quiet, I guess, that I would have you fooled. The thing that I most dreaded, while attending high school, was to wait out the school day for a gym class that sometimes, for lack of creativity, featured a series of dodge ball matches.

I am not certain what sport-like pointers dodge ball had to offer; being a good loser, taking pain in stride, learning how to evade the predators in life. What was worse, having to worry more about the sting of certain pain, even more than the flush of defeat, walking gamely off the court like a comely gladiator who has had it with the discontented throngs hemming the sidelines, shouting invective like rabbles do. These thoughts, like the dental drill, pervaded my scholarly and squirming ways, and was nothing, amid the theorems, bubbling excreta of greenish liquids above the blue gas flame of the Bunsen burner and the elegy to so many forgotten participles and principles, buried in churchyards in historic English midland countrysides. Nothing was real but the redness and depth of embarrassment that accompanied stinging pain.

Then one day the idea surfaced that the best defense was even an adequate offense, nothing too spectacular, but something that I was very capable of. As Al,  Rocco  Chris or Carlo came pummeling toward the dividing line like freshly liberated bulls in the arena, ready to unleash that unforgiving sphere upon my person, I suddenly realized that the ball, rather than attempting to elude its contact, was eminently catchable, certainly more so than a sharply thrown football on an icy winter day. I reached this conclusion on my own, and began nullifying my tormentors and assassins. The ball, having been caught, no longer hurt, and a sense of empowerment in its catching created a new found and perennially sought after confidence. Up until then, the game appeared to be one of predators hurling fireballs at flitting birds in a cage. Those gym shorts were designed to inflict more pain and bruise marks on those extended exposed thighs than was necessary. Suddenly, after just so many games, and having proved that my inexplicable "luck" was no fluke, the predators, once absorbed in their ability to dominate a game, undertook defensive measures, and withdrew into the blurred faceless pack of the flitting team. The idea, probably commonly attributed to a take charge coach on the greatest gridiron of life, that the greatest defense was actually in its offense, was likely authored in antiquity by some Persian general and renewed during some Prussian military rethink.

Now the Brooklyn of my youth was no less conspicuous for its vacant lots than the character of each of its varied streets. Those uninhabited spaces added character against the false charge of  monotony. The only thing predictable about them was that they were invariably located near a street corner, which was often useful, if topography permitted, for creating the short-cut.

"Where are you going"?

"For a container of milk"

- "To mail a letter"

To pick up a newspaper at the corner candy store"

"How are you getting there?"

"Why, by way of the short-cut!"

No-one has yet offered a reasonable explanation for this open and often derelict expanse of land. Scratching my head and pondering the invariables, it appears that there was some major real estate push into this southeast corner of East New York that might have occurred after World War I. Different developers acquired tracts of land and inadvertently established a quilt-work character that differed from one street to the next. They were careful, it seems, to leave an unfinished corner of their project, like a corner of a field in a tithe year, for beggars, vagrants, or kids in the neighborhood. Finally, the further east and south their post-war building extended, the scarcer the construction which almost enveloped into a  rural  mist of ceaseless crickets chirping; an apple tree whose greatest bounty was the numerous caterpillars that paraded on Hemlock Street coincidental with the fireworks exploded by neighborhood kids around the Fourth of July.

The lots were our Dakota badlands, where imaginary gunfights occurred behind bushes and a rare occasional boulder, Filipino jungles where we marched unseen beneath thick foliage in an effort to avenge Bataan; even the uncharted terrain of the Northwest territory, with vine covered Vedic temples concealing statuettes of Kali radiant within his splendid orb.

Each year a valiant effort was made by the kids of Autumn Avenue to erect a club house constructed of carton and used planks. Every year this lone abode which stood drenched and sagging from the previous afternoon's downpour near the side of the "short-cut" from Autumn onto the center of Sutter Avenue was unaccountably demolished, and not by any official supernumerary or superior power of faith. The mystery evolved into local lore reinforced by the rumor that it was the Crescent Street Gang that was responsible for its dismemberment. Although located two good blocks from Crescent Street, it was divined that the Gang remiss in exacting tribute or recognition, was merely exerting regional hegemony. Next year the shanty would be rebuilt with a lookout and be papered with the Journal American.

I did not have to venture too far in order to reach the nearest lot. It was the one on the southern corner of Autumn and Sutter and was bordered by the facade of Mr. Greene's building, at times covered by a billboard and a single narrow private home whose capaciousness existed below street level. The Bataan peninsula, noted for its isolation, foliated across the street from the lone house, and just south of the house, the lot deepened into a heavily vegetated depression with dilapidated shacks that leaned on the rear wall of a row of private garages that were part of the Hemlock Street residences. Part of this lot was visible from my bedroom window, separated by a fence or a screen resembling that which kept some baseballs struck by Duke Snider from flying beyond the right field wall at Ebbets Field onto Bedford Avenue. Although once, standing on the lot side of the Big Yard, a rock landed directly on my head during one of the typical western reenactments that we were inspired to play. Luckily the rock did not cause much pain, but the subsequent blood that eventfully flowed down my forehead was disconcerting. And once, the young incendiary that I was, with a rare and vaguer understanding of pyrotechnics,  discovered a small fire burning a few feet from Mr.Greene's establishment. A discarded cardboard box stood nearby and I thought to stifle the tiny blaze by smothering it with the carton, but the fire spread in a strange shamanistic circle and the fire department was summoned to snuff it out. Fortunately no damage was caused, but Mr. Greene, who must have been burning trash [and doing a poor job of it] asked me if I had anything to do with the blaze. I replied "No."

History has shown that most of the nearby kids lived "around the corner" on Hemlock Street and there was little divergence in this plain physical fact. It was a strange constant that rarely diverted south onto the shady Hemlock Street that approached Belmont and Pitkin, with its large trees that formed bowers across a littered street during its autumnal discharge of globular "itchy ball" seeds. This "seeding" of the streets coincided with the beginning of the school year, with the street part of the route to the school of PS 159. Every now and then we would engage in a vicarious ongoing rock battle with these harmless globules. Still, after more than eleven years in the neighborhood, I knew of no kids that populated the streets north of Sutter. Around the corner kids hung out on stoops before tiny hedged gardens immured by red brick.. They played in the driving alleys between the two family homes adjoined by arched masonry that extended to the lots on Blake Avenue and Helen, the local witch whom we all assumed was a witch because she lived alone in another sad and solitary house that disappeared below street level. This was the lot of the crabapple tree, a path that ran parallel to the facade of the last house where crazy Robert and his older slick or suave brothers Dave and Frannie lived with their cockaded wild root hair, leather jacket and studded boots. Elliot Sachs lived upstairs.

Living on the last house on the block, both crazy Robert and Elliot posed the greatest threat to my safety, and I quickly discovered, amongst the two earliest friends of mine, that a thin veneer of security sometimes came with numbers.However, we were more like the herbivorous types, grazing in the lots when not flipping baseball cards or discussing the merits of New York's center fielders. I, for some reason not yet adequately expounded, proved to be, or so it seemed to me, the most vulnerable of the pack, and the knowledge of this entailed a sense of isolation.

Eventually my friends moved, replaced only by a reputed cousin of one of them. We quickly learned that Gilbert had  been raised in one of those southern states. His  accent, and the mystique of southern racism clung to him, and shortly after his arrival on the last house on the block, yards from the cocoon infested crab apple tree and the solitary house of Helen the witch, he was quickly expected to address the neighborhood with local insight on the nature of race relations. Gilbert warmed up to the chore with alacrity and avoiding disappointment said all the things that he thought we wished to be told.

Now the Crescent Street Gang mostly resided on the next block; that is Crescent Street. The corner was a commercial complex, with the towering  red winged Pegasus adjacent the small alley where we later drank our sabbath wine with pound cake in the shadow of the synagogue. Across the street, Paul, an aproned green grocer busily displayed his vegetables. A small grocery with prominent tins of Genoan olive oil occupied the northwest corner of Crescent and Sutter while across the way the electric sign of Kruticks Drugs swayed gently in the early evening summer breeze. This section of Crescent was busy. Two different municipal bus routes whirred down a bright tree lined street with its two story residences. The gang may have congregated on its high stoops and surveyed the masses ambling up this  popular street to the Eighth Avenue subway or Fulton Street El on Euclid and Pitkin. Children plied its sidewalks to and from the elementary school.

The gang eventually found other places to "hang out" that were more compatible with the growing prosperity of its members. That included the corner candy store with its juke box bellowing doo-wop harmonies or Memphis versions of rock n' roll. There were plenty of diversions like the sunflower seed vending machine, or the interest in hot rods, many of which were seen and often heard careening through our placid streets, scattering fallen leaves, itchy balls, and the boys shoving their makeshift wooden scooters that consisted of milk crates, indented bottle caps and roller skate wheels.

The hot rod, say this '56 Chevy, a bioluminescent Valencia orange, with a ZZ-502 big-block under its shined hood, hooked to a Turbo 400 trans with a Gear Vendor overdrive. It sounded like a fleet of M-60 Pattons eluding a wet barrage on a rickety pontoon across Suez to Qantara. Birds took to the air, and housewives to the clotheslines to peek at this sudden and violent disturbance. They might have seen a blur of a sleek '49 Chevy coupe, the "Golden Deer"  revving in the alley, to the general admiration and envy of many; the sleek pomaded hair like the chrome polished ointment flagging in the Brooklyn breeze. The hoarse souped up engine mimicking the frenzy of Little Richard scaling the keyboard in a garish pink suit.

Aside from the noise and litter of sunflower shells and Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, this gang caused little trouble. Brooks decided to hang out in the school yard when he himself should have been behind a desk somewhere. Our class was admitted into the yard, Brooksie gave our young and memorably attractive teacher, Miss Rochford, a hard time. "Hey teach" he snorted, with a cigarette dangling from his Presley curled lip. "Hello Brooks" I recall having said, it being good to be in the graces of local royalty. After some adamantine coaxing, Miss Rochford persuaded Brooks to leave the premises.

The Crescent Street Gang, being professed warriors with a turf to protect, and a glee club of cheering young tight knit chicks, often diversified their social activity.. There was the a capella choir, subdivided into quintets, quartets and trios that emulated the smooth tones of Dion and The [Bronx] Belmonts or the Crests. They spread out onto all street corners, impeccably murmuring new lyrics of old pieces on the Gee record label or the Clef Tones.Their intertwined mellow doo-wop harmonies overcoming the facile ooh wah ooh wah la dee lyrics like wafting cigarette smoke drifting across the outfield on a humid summer night, evaporating into dreams beyond the  lots and their famed poison ivy and the traverse of the world they had known; beneath the oily red shadows of the wings of the Mobil Pegasus on Crescent Street and Sutter.

Now paladin could do no better than I when a series of turf wars erupted in the dusty lots shortly after the low income city project had been erected between Euclid and Fountain Avenue. Gangs congealed like the brief ignition of fireflys on hot summer nights. Everyone looked for some common identity, something to rally around. Alliances provided safety and underscored Maxim Litvinov's pre-war concept of collective security that had failed to garner real support in the West. Like a medieval courtier I hoarded arms, various branches and sticks and geometric spheres for some unknown future clash of cultures and races and thermal nuclear holocausts.

I would scavenge the lots for precision wood with quality protuberances of variant girth. Swords of all sizes, flails, battle axes, spears, maces, halberds, whips and mallets. All these armaments were carefully scrutinized and cataloged. The hallway to our home was transformed into a veritable armory of imaginary ordinance in anticipation of the grand melee.

The wild kids of Hemlock Street could not rate with the Crescent Street Gang, but could be recruited like the Minute Men in an instant; a reserve force of motleys, ready to defend and reassert sovereignty in the vacant lots. They could, like bush gatherers, collect throwable stones all day. These stones adhered to rigid Crescent Street specifications. There were weight parameters and aerodynamic considerations. They could be gloved, tossed like a Carl Hubbell screwball or a Herb Score fastball, clubbed or catapulted by a trebuchet or mangonel. Everything but the kitchen sink and boiling Genoan olive oil could be thrown into the fray. It was assumed that the other side would be equipped with a panoply of native weapons, garnished in manioc and decked in plantain suits.

In this trying time, when revolts were quelled in eastern Europe, and Operation Overlord would soon fail to achieve its objective in Suez, I came as a courtier, and fought on a dusty vacant field of honor, an affiliate of a barely recognized auxiliary of the Crescent Street Gang. It must have been a vacant lot around Blake and Crescent. We were ushered into the battle, at first a reinforcement behind the main attack, in anticipation of our stone flinging skills. We stood as the ground was beaten by a frenzied sally into our defenses, the air compressed by this strange breathless collective effort. We stood like so many restless elephants in the Shah's cavalry ready to be unleashed. At last the word came from some unknown Crescent Street general, while another force of Cypress Hills boys streaked east along the path; stones flying like so many missiles. I recall the attackers abruptly halting on the path, dust plumes swirled into the air, a hail of stones descending on their line of attack. They retreated. The fighting stopped. The entire action could not have lasted more than three minutes. I was seven years old.

Barry Steinberg July 10, 2004 Eilon        

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