Once Around the Block

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Born on Hinsdale Street

Brooklyn is Not Like Buffalo

Favorite Stories

Remembering Growing Up

Uncle Meyer

Sit Down and Shut Up

My Childhood Loves

My Brother’s Battle with Anti-Semitism

Sex Rears its Ugly Head

Learning the Facts of Life

A Jolly Fourth of July

See-Sawed

So That’s What a Cross Looks Like

A Private Striptease

In a Captured Audience

Punishment Too Severe

Bad, Bad Boy

The Unprinted Poems

Overcoming a Stigma

A Walk with Miss Carolyn

Expelled

The Secrecy

One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The First and Last Punishment

A Primitive Society

Locked Out

Chapter 2

Uncle Fool

The Candy Store

Bad Company

The Antiquated School System

CHAPTER 3

The Workforce

Romance on a Folding Cot

Babysitting

In Desperation

I Can’t Have Babies

Coney Island Date

CHAPTER 4

Goodbye, Papa

Hitchhiking

The Night Prowler

CHAPTER 5

The Waiting Game

Frances in Lounge Heaven

The Clara Street Bunch

Chapter 6

The Unmilitary Bearing

Breaking In

Maneuvers

The Train

Taking Care of #1

The Blue and the Red

The Tragedy of Private Smitty

The Spider

A True American

From Out of the Sky Two Vultures Fell

On the Subject of V.D.

Expert Rifleman

Frank

A Home Away from Home

The Fuck Up

A Leader of Men

Pick on Your Own Size

Back on Maneuvers

A Soldier in Love

A Letter from Adele’s Box of Memories

Mr. Hot Pants

The Gay Guy

CHAPTER 7

Troop Ship

England

Exeter

His Box of Lures

Shooting the Dogs

The Best Kept Secret

A Rewarding Day in Clayton

CHAPTER 8

We All Thank You

The Imminent Invasion

My Job

Destroying the Fortifications

The Sixteen Battles

The Compass

Rations

Hold That Line

An Act of Pity

The Nazi Colonel

Scared to Death

Sanctuary is a Pile of Manure

To the Rear Run

Walk or Die

"One Man’s Trench

is Another Man’s Grave"

Maintain Your Sanity

Italian Surrender

The Death of Hoyt Smith

Sergeant Morris

A Near Fatal Mistake

The Tank

A Matter of Semantics

The Indian

Against My Orders

The White Blanket

Massi, Buried Alive

A Legacy

Protect Your Flank

Nature’s Demand

Asleep in the Impact Area

The Concoction

CHAPTER 9

Fatigue

Crossing the Viaduct

Smells and Sounds

Kissing Ass

Too Late to Surrender

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

The Mattress

Where Did They Go?

Intuition… Go the Other Way

Cries from a Burning Farm House

Who is That Out There? It is Me.

First Come First Serve… Leads to Death

Master Sergeant Horwitt

No Mistaking That Voice

Now I Lay Me Down to Die

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

CHAPTER 10

Wounded, Help Wanted

Shell Shock

Penny Peterson

You Americans Think of Everything

On the Road Back

CHAPTER 11

Back on the Line

What You Makin’, Sarge?

The Rain Drops

The Body Invaders

The Deer Are On Our Side

Changing of the Socks

In Retrospect

Damn the High Explosives

CHAPTER 12

Wounded Again

The Frog in Bed

Drop Me Again and I’ll Kill You

Healing

Back in England

Hi, Yank

Patricia Self

The Pick Up

Anne Lu

Dad Wants You Home

I Saw the Spires of Oxford

Going Home

CHAPTER 13

A Sad Return

CHAPTER 14

Why Did it Last So Long?

Was Something Dead in Me?

My Last Salute

To Shower—Every Night

Is This You?

CHAPTER 15

Going From Full Throttle to Low Gear

Eddie’s Invitation

A Good Sale

Brush with the Law

Taken for a Ride

First Grade Firefighter

I Met His Kind Before

The Cellar Fire

Spooks

The Bothersome Shrapnel

My Performance at the Met

We Are Going to Miss Him

A Down and Out Army Buddy

"The Franconia"

A Day and Night in the Life of Firefighter

The Fire House Cats

The Gift

Barney K. Ryan

One Beer Too Many

If You’re Black, Step Back

The Disappearing Desk

A Fire in the Fire House

Don’t Jump, Walk

The Scars of War

The Badge

Hands Off

Turning the Attack Dog

Is This My New Dog Food?

"How Much is that

Doggie in the Window?"

Habits are Hard to Break

Seeing a Ghost

My Worst Day

There Goes the Neighborhood

The Red Shoes

The Little People

My Dream House

A Needle in a Haystack

The Sisters

Magic Mirror

I Don’t Like Potato Pancakes

That Rainy Day

The Last Request

Learning the Hard Way

CHAPTER 16

My Way

Around the World

CHAPTER 17

Predators and Browsers

Fuck the Bra

Harry

Heart

Where am I?

Back Home and Off Again

Big Problem

Opportunity

CHAPTER 18

Life in Florida

Old Wives’ Tales

Primates

Mel

Dirty Lyrics

1776

A Day of Reckoning

Fun on the Road

Pluto

The Insult

The Glories of Egypt

The Great Pyramids

Normandy Revisited

What Was It?

Jessica

Box of Memories

 . . . The last letter in the box

Chronology

Bits and Pieces

Break Your Mother’s Back Syndrome

Self-Explanation

Over and Out

My Hand

Afterword

It matters not how far we go,

Or how quickly ticks the clock,

Or whether we roam to and fro,

Life is once around the block.

To

Adele and Hattie

To

John, whose patience I hope has been rewarded, my personal gift to you.

Barney

Foreword

I did not write this book with any intent that it go to print. I wrote it as a legacy for my daughter so that when I am gone, she can retain my life with all its adventures and misadventures, with my thoughts and opinions of a world I once lived in. She can pick it up and flip it to any page and I am there to speak to her.

It is a legacy I leave behind in her care. I can lie still between the covers or momentarily be revived.

There is a special place in my

heart for Harry, who can find me

between the pages of this book.

There is no way back, only the memories.

The gate is chained and locked,

The windows are shut and barred,

The wall is thick and steep,

The moat is wide and deep.

But suppose you did,

You got under the gate, between the bars,

Around the wall, circumvented the moat.

There would be no one there to greet you.

The chain is broken, the gate is rotted,

The lock is rusted, the bars have fallen

From the decayed wood.

The walls are crumbled and turned to pile.

The moat is dry, bridged with fallen timber.

You have only the memories… .

Introduction

Barney Krein was many things to me: friend, mentor, brother, firefighter, and father-figure. I never knew my own father, but if I ever wanted someone to understand me, respect me, someone to be proud of me, it was Barney.

He wore many hats in his life: soldier, poet, lover, firefighter, adventure-traveler, husband, father and writer, just to name a few. But I admired him most as the human being who was simply Barney. He made no boasts nor excuses for anything he did, good or bad. He was simply and intensely himself—and what you will find in this book is raw truth. Barney was a very brave man, in many different ways—from storming the beaches of Normandy in World War II, to twenty years at one of the busiest firehouses in New York City. But I think he was bravest when he wrote this book—this coming of age story, this war story, this love story, that is not in any way a boast or a brag. He just put pen to paper and let it out for everyone to see.

When I first heard that Barney Krein was getting something down on paper, I was very excited. The things he had seen, the things he had done would be one heck of a good story. But when I heard that he had no intention to try to get the book published, it threw me for a bit of a loop. You see, he wanted to write this as something to leave for his daughter, something she could have of him after he died. But I knew that many could benefit from knowing him, and I, for one, also needed to have him around after he was gone.

This book is more than the collected exciting and moving stories of one man’s very interesting life. A young man starts to find himself and to define himself in a world at war. He has to become someone else, in order to serve and to survive. How does he keep the decency of the person he was before it all began? And after this war, what will happen for the rest of his life? In here you will find a coming out from terror and hardship to find beauty in life, no matter how hard it hides. You will live through it with him, and you will come through it with him.

I have to say a word or two about Adele Krein, Barney’s wife, because I know that it was her strength, too, that produced this work. She was so very proud and delighted with Barney’s achievements, especially when Once Around the Block was accepted into the pre-eminent Military History Library at Brown University. When Adele gave advice, you just had to listen up, because it would hit you like a ton of bricks. She would be so clear, you would wonder why you hadn’t seen it for yourself. Adele and Barney came into my life at just the right time for me, when I was a young man trying to leave traumas behind and find life. They were like a great comedy act—Adele with the great ideas and Barney with the perfect timing. They accepted me for who I was, and gave me all the things I needed to go out in the world to make myself happy. I was a very lucky man.

After reading his book for the first time, I knew that it needed to be shared with as many people as possible. I got together with a few family members and some of the guys down at my firehouse and got the Once Around the Block manuscript proofread and self-published. It gave me great pleasure to hear how much Barney and Adele loved what I did with the book. He finally had a real copy of his book to place on his shelf. But my work wasn’t finished yet. From the great reaction I got from everyone who read the book, I knew I had to push on. I was fortunate to be introduced to author Peter Nabokov, whose support of Once Around The Block has been much appreciated and very encouraging.

Adele and Barney passed away in 2006, within weeks of each other. I’m finding it hard to live in a world without them, but this book makes it possible and lessens the pain of their passing. Barney’s trust in me, his approval of what had been done so far, and then hearing that he wanted me to take his book as far as it can go, gives me hope that I may have accomplished something for a remarkable man whose story should not be missed.

John Penman

Chapter 1

The Formidable Years

Born on Hinsdale Street

I weighed four pounds when I was born. I almost left this world as fast as I came in. In order to keep me alive they had to wrap towels around hot bricks and lay me in between them.

If I had a baby like Mrs. Krein’s I would choke it. My mother heard these words from her upstairs neighbor in the Brownesville section of Brooklyn where I was born. She kept me hidden from her neighbor’s eyes until I was six months old. A large dark veil shrouded the baby carriage to prevent the curious from so much as a peek. I suspect they thought I was bitten by a tsetse fly, because no matter, even with the carriage bouncing up and down she would say, He’s asleep.

She told me my face was as long as my body and that I was the color of a Chow’s tongue. The year was 1915, the day of the blessed event was April, 30th.

I was in my teens when my mother told this to me, too late to affect my future; I did not think I was ugly at all.

I started school in a little red schoolhouse. It was a one-room school, each row was a different grade, eight rows, eight grades, one teacher taught us all. She would start with the first grade and busy them with some lesson and then start with the second grade and so on up the rows. This was in the town of Kensington, Buffalo, New York. It was the beginning of a hell of a struggle that would last eleven years. Each time we moved to a different town I got put back a grade.

Kensington was a small town with cookie cutter houses, more like little one car garages, yet people were comfortable in them. They were spaced like checkers on a checkerboard.

My parents had a partnership in what was primarily a grocery store, but they also carried hardware, animal feed, seeds for planting, garden tools and overalls. The living quarters were upstairs, and then on a third floor, a big storage attic with an area the size of the whole house, with nails that held down the roof and shingles coming through the ceiling.

My father and mother were in partnership with my father’s sister and her husband. Between the two families there were twelve people living in the upstairs apartment.

The eggs we sold came from our own chicken coop, and we had some thirty chickens, which were being serviced by one rooster, Big Red. He was a giant of a bird. There were three other roosters, but Big Red had them running in all directions. He ran the roost. He also ran the dogs and cats who approached the hen house with flying leaps and thrusting feet. Only people had him strutting and clucking from a safe distance.

Jack, my cousin, was my age. We were seven. Today if someone is in love with a chicken, he is put away; Jack was in love with Big Red. It was a no hands on kind of love. Big Red sensed Jack’s affection and strutted and clucked closer to him than anyone else. When it was my turn to collect eggs from the hen house I made sure Red was scratching somewhere out in the field. All chickens had the free run of the grounds. I was a bit watchful of Red since I saw him chase off the town bully dog that was sniffing for rabbits, but Jack never looked over his shoulder. He and Red had an understanding.

To this day I don’t know what prompted the decision to remove Red from the hen house, to wring his neck and prepare him for the table. It seems old roosters cause spots in eggs which become unsellable. Big Red had to be enticed into the hen house and ambushed. My feeling was, I’ll take the drumstick.

When Jack’s father emerged from the coop clutching Big Red by the neck and legs, Jack was seventy pounds of unleashed furry. Red lost a few feathers in the ensuing tussle, but gained a place of retirement, his own fenced ground, where Jack could love him in that no hands on love affair.

Around this time in 1922 I acquired an iron horse-drawn fire engine, a toy I spent many an hour playing with. Also around this time, my father sold out his part of the partnership to his sister and we moved back to Brooklyn. In 1957, when my father’s sister died, the Kensington property was put up for sale. On the evening of it being turned over to its new owners, Bessie, one of the daughters, went up in the attic where life’s discarded memories lay deeply entrenched in the dust of accumulated past.

She found two toy horses, hidden for thirty years from the affectionate touch of a child’s hands, frozen in an eternal gallop pulling an engine that had long forgotten the squeak of its wheels.

I am still in fond possession of this indestructible toy.

In her note to me in the package she wrote, A life of childhood flashed past me.

If man has a soul, mine will be carried off to its proper place by the little driver who has sat so patiently in limbo waiting for a child to grow beyond the realm of reality.

Brooklyn is Not Like Buffalo

I played on the streets of Brooklyn on 13th Avenue, push cart alley, where drooping horses hitched to their albatrosses shifted from one hind leg to the other as the monotony of the twelve-hour day exhausted them. It was not like playing on the streets of Kensington, where the horse was spirited and the owner proud of such a fine family member.

I remember Jack and I seeing a young Kensington horse stumble while pulling a buggy. He fell and broke his leg. The horse rose, but was obviously in pain. The owner locked his hands around the horse’s leg beneath his chest (it was his right front leg) and held the weight off the broken leg. But after the veterinarian came, the horse had to be destroyed. The wife and daughter stood in each other’s arms crying; they walked to the horse and put their heads to his side sobbing. The vet had them move away and as he raised his pistol, all three kissed the horse on his forehead where the bullet would enter. Jack and I ran behind a tree thinking that the killing of the horse would bring harm to us. We heard the shot.

The three were sobbing uncontrollably as they mounted the vet’s wagon and kept looking back until the wagon rounded the corner.

Where we had lived in Kensington there had been a field behind us, then woods. At seven it was a deep forest of hidden mysteries with small ponds where little red frogs the size of raisins lived. I would catch some, but I was never able to get them home alive.

Hunters abounded and the forest hid their cruel intent.

Stay out of the woods, my father would say, a hunter will mistake you for a bird.

At the far end of the field was a rifle range where soldiers would come to practice. A high mound between the firing line and the woods was the impact area. The tall trees guarding the perimeter of the forest were all dead from wounds they had received. Jack and I would pick up empty shells and blow into the cavities to see who could make the loudest whistle.

In Kensington, Jack had a paper route down by the garages. He and my brother would pull a sled with me and the folded papers on it. The cold icy winds coming off Lake Erie froze my fingers and toes until I cried in pain. Our school was in that cold Lake Erie climate.

Freddie Duncan was a kid our age. He got in bad with the teacher, Mr. Kennedy, and the school caretaker was called upon to dish out the punishment. The whole class stood frozen outside the school window listening to Duncan’s cries. Other crimes went unpunished. Bond white bread, unsliced and wrapped in colorful wax paper, came with a long sucking candy on top, between the buttocks of the bread. I would puncture a hole in the wrapper, slip out the candy stick and replace the bread on the shelf.

Yes, 13th Avenue in Brooklyn was different… too many cowboy movies at the nickelodeon put realism in our games. Once we threw a rope over the lowest foot spike on the telegraph pole, about seven feet above the ground, put a noose around a bad guys neck, and three of us yanked him up. As he began to gasp and flay his arms one of us tried to pull him down by his legs while the others pulled him up by his neck. He was rescued by the sheriff in a pair of overalls, rushing from the barbershop.

We lived on the 6th floor. No elevator. Our window faced an empty lot. At the cry of, Ma, I’m hungry two slices of white bread, thick in butter and wrapped in newspaper, came flying out the window. The iceman’s dilemma was leaving his wagon long enough to deliver the ten cent block of ice up to the sixth floor walk-up. When coming down he’d find his wagon swarming with kids who were turning his ice blocks into cubes. But one iceman found a remedy… a vivacious dog, tethered on a rope… we kids stayed clear of that wagon. The dog had nothing else to do but stay cool and lick the ice.

Mothers with babies kept their carriages in the apartment house basement. These basements were the supply depot for the carriage wheels we needed for our soapbox wagons. When my kid sister was one year old, I stole the wheels from a carriage to replace the wheels that were stolen from hers.

No… Brooklyn was not like Kensington… nor anyplace else.

Favorite Stories

I had a few favorite books and fairy tales when I was young. When I was six or so, my favorite was The Sun Bonnet Babies. It has been a life span since I have seen this book, but I still recall the poem somewhere among its pages:

The Sun Bonnet babies are sailing away,

Away to the land of the tulips, they say.

To the land of windmills, canals and dikes,

Where children’s sport is flying kites.

Goodbye dear Mollie, goodbye dear May,

We wish you a happy time away.

But don’t forget your friends at home,

While far in foreign lands you roam.

Perhaps it was the line, while far in foreign lands you roam, that took my fancy.

My other favorite was Reynard the Fox. I had loved his cleverness and unethical deeds when the rabbit caused the King of Beasts some grief. The King asked Reynard to bring the rabbit before him, and Reynard did, though just his head, the rest of the rabbit he ate.

When the Wolf challenged Reynard to a fight in front of all the other beasts, Reynard could not refuse and lose face, so he accepted. The date was set. All animals of the kingdom where there… they came to see Reynard punished for his foul deeds.

Reynard appeared in the ring. He had completely shaved off all his hair and covered his body with grease. The wolf could not get a grip on him, not even a bite. In sheer disgust the wolf gave up. Reynard grew back his hair before the next chapter. William Tell… I liked that part about the apple… the rest was hearsay.

Robin Hood was good, but Maid Marion was a drag. Robin should have given Little John at least one whack before he fell off of the log.

Rumplestilskin was alright, but I still don’t know his last name.

Cinderella… bullshit. You can’t dance in a glass slipper. And what the hell did they do with all them pumpkin seeds?

Young Lochinvar… I liked the part that they said, but save for his broad sword, he weapons had none.

I liked King Arthur, his idea of a round table. He just walked in and sat down… anywhere.

I liked Jack and the Bean Stalk, a great story. He steals the guy’s gold, causes his death, and lives happily ever after.

Best of all, I think I loved the old woman who went to market to buy a fat pig. The pig would not jump over the stile, so she could not get him home to the butcher. So she went to everyone to ask them to commit murder, mayhem and torture to get the pig to jump. They all refused, but only because they wanted to be rewarded. She finally got the dumb cow to give her some milk which she gave to the cat just to start the ball rolling…

The cat began to gnaw the rope,

The rope began to hang the butcher,

The butcher began to kill the ox,

The ox began to drink the water,

The water began to quench the fire,

The fire began to burn the stick,

The stick began to beat the dog,

The dog began to bite the pig,

The pig jumps over the stile,

And the old lady gets her ass home.

That story really said a lot to us third graders who took our reading lessons from those Grimm Brothers.

Remembering Growing Up

The farthest back my memory goes is when I was two years old and living in Maine. I was sitting next to my father on his wagon. He was in the junk business. It was during World War I. The junk business was quite lucrative in those years. A friend of my father saw him as we drove into the junkyard, and called out to him,

Morris, look at this!

He was holding up a large iron rooster, like from a giant weather vane… why this particular incident is so etched in my mind is a mystery to me.

My next memory is from when I was three, still living in Maine. I was riding my four-wheeled hobby horse which got completely out of control; I crashed into a wooden stoop and dismantled the bottom step.

At four my memory takes me to Ozone Park, Long Island. There was a building being built across the street from the house I was living in. The carpenters had the lumber piled six feet high at the curb. I climbed to the top of the pile and began to sway back and forth. It was a Sunday, so no one was at work. When the pile reached the point of no return, it toppled, pinning me under it. My leg was broken. A passerby got me out from under and I hobbled home. Each time I put my weight on my broken leg, it wasn’t there. I felt no pain so I never cried out. My leg was put in a cast and I wreaked havoc in the house trying to ride my tricycle.

At five, living on Sterling Place in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, one winter day I took my sled up a hill. It was a short steep hill with a garage wall at the bottom. I slid down the hill on my sled, crashed into the wall and knocked myself senseless. When I came to, my lightning glider had a split rail and I had a splitting headache.

At six, still living in Sterling Place, I found a new hobby… flat pennies. Nickels too, but they were harder to come by. Dodging traffic I would lay them on the trolley tracks, and the trolley would squash them… until my father learned how I came to acquire a matchbox full of flat pennies. If I valued my life, I was not to go near the trolley tracks again.

At seven, living in Kensington, I developed an obsession for peanut butter. I would steal a jar of peanut butter from off the grocery shelf and take it into a field. Not being strong enough to unscrew the cap, I would smash the jar with a rock and eat the contents from between the broken glass and splinters.

At eight I was back in Brooklyn being tormented by my Uncle Meyer.

Uncle Meyer

My Uncle Meyer’s oversized frame on bent scrawny legs still runs through my mind. In my youth I compared him to a frog.

He had long retired and devoted his life to sadism. He tooled his body for sadistic use as one who sharpens the edge of an executioner’s ax. He maintained a three-day stubble for one purpose, to catch me and rub my tender skin against his porcupine bristles until I cried, Uncle! My face would burn from the irritation for twenty minutes. At Coney Island I would be lifted from my sand castles, carried screaming and kicking into the ocean, and held under the waves until the salt water sickened me.

He had ten nicotine thumbs for fingers, each finger was like a stunted cucumber. When I was sitting and eating, he would grab my leg just above the knee and squeeze, causing me to jump in pain and spill my food.

His biggest claim to fame was an act that took him thirty years to perfect… thirty years of five packs a day of Camel cigarettes. When he drew everyone’s attention he would announce in a voice of great pride,

Watch this!

Then he would unfold a handkerchief, stretch it across his lips and blow hard. To the roll of an unheard drum, he would hold it up for all to see—a yellowish-brown nicotine stain from his putrid lungs.

At the age of forty his throat and lungs would have no more of him and cut him off from his air supply. He was taken to a hospital where he sat in a tent, with a hole in his throat that bypassed that part which had disclaimed him. The stench from his exhaled breath was unbearable. A nurse, holding her breath while inserting a clean oxygen tube, replaced it incorrectly. The oxygen got under the sensitive skin around his eyes and blew him up like a hippo.

When he knew he was dying he started to write a farewell letter to his wife, while I watched him through the viewing window of his life supporting tent… but like everything else in his life, it was left unfinished.

When I look back I remember bits and pieces of him—like the gigantic jig-saw puzzle he worked on for weeks that covered the entire dining room table, like the stubs of cigarettes he never threw away and kept in a jar for the times he ran out… and his black magic.

He was called upon to perform beinkus, the witchcraft of vacuum cups on the back of an ailing victim. When one of his children was sick (she was ten years old), I sat in fright listening to her screams while he performed his voodoo in front of an invited audience.

When I got too big to torment, he would cheat at checkers, even when he was winning.

Sit Down and Shut Up

When I was eight years old I was going to a school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. We had just moved from the Borough Park section. This was one of the times I did not lose a term. I was in the third grade. Our teacher, whatever her name was, asked each child to come forward and recite a poem. When it was my turn, I recited:

When I was young

And had no sense,

I took a girl

behind the fence.

I gave her a dollar

not to hollar,

I gave her a half

not to laugh,

I gave her a Quarter

to stay in order,

I gave her a nickel

to suck my pickle,

I gave her my pay

and I went away.

I was told to sit down and shut up. It was not until I was eleven years old that I realized what I had gotten for a nickel.

My Childhood Loves

From the time I was eight years old I was always falling in love. It was either a girl in my classroom or a girl in my neighborhood or a girl living in the same apartment house.

At eight, my first love was Sylvia Brickward. Then there was Shirley Boswell. I can’t remember too much about Sylvia Brickward, I can just see her marching across the assembly room, in an all girl formation, until she is swallowed up in the bottleneck of the narrow exit door, out of my sight.

The pigment on the picture of Shirley Boswell still has some bright spots in my memory: I am a bystander watching myself follow her home at a safe distance to find out where she lives. Then for the next few days I go there after school standing half hidden behind a sycamore tree, watching her at play with her girlfriends. When she looks towards me, all of me goes behind the tree. Then on the third day her father comes out and chases me away. I am too embarrassed to go back.

Margaret Small, I was eleven, just fleeting memories… I put a brand new pencil, freshly sharpened, on her desk as I passed by.

Helen Benjamin, I was around twelve. She was one of the few who returned my affections. Her brother, Benny Benjamin, made the arrangement for me to carry her books home.

There were others, but they are faded and gone. I remember a handkerchief that I carried in my geography book because it was the largest book I carried and I could keep the handkerchief secretly unfolded at page one hundred because I loved her one hundred times more than I loved any of the others at the time that I loved her. It was such a warm feeling of guilt, keeping her hankie.

I was always shy when I confronted my loves, so shy that in their presence I could not speak their name.

My Brother’s Battle with Anti-Semitism

I have never run into any serious anti-Semitism, but there was an incident when I was with my brother, Eddie, when he was cockalized. At the time I was nine and he was eleven.

I took him out of our neighborhood which was predominantly Jewish, to a park that was in an Italian neighborhood. This park boasted swings like nowhere else around. We never made it to the swings. We got as far as the first water fountain and found our way blocked by five goyim. This was the word we used to separate them from us. It wasn’t that they suspected us of being Jewish, it was that we were strangers on their turf.

Getting cockalized is not a painful procedure, it’s a feeling of submission to a higher order. It is rare when five buttons need additional persuasion. You just have to hope that the executioner is deft, and he usually is. Four crooked fingers, a swift swipe at the fly, and the five buttons depart their eyelets—the executioner’s job is done. Now the drones rush in, no experience needed, everyone reaches, pulls and grabs, down come the pants, down come the drawers, the victim has been cockalized. What made Eddie’s cockalization different was the circumcised penis… a rare find in a goyim neighborhood. So while I was firmly held at bay, Eddie was ridiculed and mocked, mingled with screams of scornful laughter, which brought the attention of Murphy. I thought all policemen were named Murphy. Anyway, Murphy intervened, the goyim left, and we were escorted to the line of demarcation with a word to the wise from Murphy,

Stay away from dem wops.

Eddie and I were brothers, but it wasn’t until our early twenties that we became friends. When we were kids playing games, he very rarely came out best.

There was the time we were playing with a train set. The engine was a wind-up type, with a heavy coil spring. Exposed to an open bottom were gears grinding in opposite directions. Bored with running the train on its tracks, I ran it over Eddie’s head. It suddenly came alive, devouring his hair and swallowing it up into its tiny innards. Screams of pain as roots departed from scalp brought my mother on the run. There was no way she could get the thing to regurgitate. It continued to feed its insatiable appetite for hair. A large pair of scissors (to this day I don’t know where she conjured them up) finally separated the predator from its prey. Eddie looked like a potted plant that hadn’t been watered in a week.

Playing Cowboys and Indians is harmless enough, except when Eddie the Indian has his ankles tied together by Bernie the Cowboy. Unknown to their mother (Fannie the squaw), gently pushes Standing Eddie to go outside and play. Standing Eddie topples like a tree in a forest, hits his head on the corner of the baseboard.

By the time he was twenty-one Eddie lost most of his hair, but he kept his scar and took it with him on his dying day. He died at the age of forty-seven.

After that incident in the park, I lived by a code which I even follow today:

If someone bigger than you is trying to hurt you, hit ’em where it hurts and run like hell, unless you think you can take him, in which case stay and beat the shit out of him.

My father was in the business of digging foundations from Maine to New York… I often wondered in my later years if he had been in a different kind of business, one in which he stayed put, if my life would have turned out different.

Sex Rears its Ugly Head

When Lindberg made his famous hop I was already twelve, Gertrude Newman was fourteen, the Lindy Hop was about to be conceived, and I was about to discover how one goes about conceiving. Gertrude said, Whoever catches me, fucks me. I caught her. It was a time of great events.

In the year 1927 a lot of home construction was going on. Wherever there was an empty lot a house was going up. We kids used them as playgrounds, especially the ones with the exposed foundations. Lots of sand hills and walls to climb on. We five kids were engrossed in a game of sorts, when a vision appeared on a sand hill and spoke those five famous words. It was a cold afternoon, but with ten hot hands like spiders going berserk, she was stripped in no time flat. Like a Sir Walter Raleigh I laid my sheepskin coat down for her naked body to recline on. Gertrude Newman had nothing to be ashamed about, with a brand new fourteen-year-old body like hers, any girl would have gladly stepped out of her shoes.

I was too inexperienced then to appreciate the firmness of her body, but even so, exploring her was exciting. At fourteen I thought I was going to die when I entered her.

I had never planned my first sexual encounter to be a spectator sport, but then again, how many of us can plan our first big bang into manhood.

When I was fourteen, Gertrude was going like sixteen, and my father was between holes and going bankrupt. He needed that extra little push to get out. I provided the push, Gertrude provided the hole, her father provided the threat… my father took the eleventh, (chapter that is) we moved and I stepped back a term in school.

Learning the Facts of Life

I met Lou the watchman when I was thirteen years old. Directly across the road from my father’s store in Hollis, before his bankruptcy, they were building some homes. After the foundation was laid and the building materials arrived, Lou the watchman was hired to watch.

It was a psychological move on Lou’s part. How better to control these wild kids then to make friends with them.

What I didn’t learn in school, I learned in the confines of Lou the Watchman’s shack, and what I learned scared the hell out of me. His qualifications as a teacher was that all his knowledge came out of a whisky bottle. His main subject was sex. Penis erection, orgasm, lust, rape, masturbation and gang bang, and he promised I was going to go through all these stages when I grew up.

In the evening when Lou came on duty my friend, Joey Easter, and I would sit in his shack. With the door closed, in words well preserved in alcohol, came step-by-step vivid explanations of the mechanics of sex. Lou was obsessed with Mrs. Liebowitz, a pretty woman who lived in a pretty house on 111th Avenue. He used her as an example on how to make love. Getting into her ass, was his worn out phrase. So I thought that is how you make love. Lou made no association between love and babies… it was just love for the lust of it.

On the evenings when he got so drunk he could not stand up or leave the shack, Lou’s money would spill from his wallet as he tried to get me to go to the store for another bottle of whisky. I would gather his money and other valuables strewn on the floor, and take them across to my father to hold for him. The next day I would return all his money and possessions, plus a hot breakfast my mother prepared for him.

In the year and a half it took to finish the buildings, I learned enough to better cope with Gert, but I am thankful for Jim Allen, a seventeen-year-old punk who held class behind a garage. For the lack of a blackboard in his outdoor classroom, he used his own body parts as a prime example on the art of masturbation, down to the last result. He showed me where to put that thing.

Although my encounter with Gert at fourteen held some satisfaction for me, she knew there were bigger and better things in life, and so she persuaded Joey Easter to get his half brother, Buddy Wiggens, who was 15, to join us. There were now four of us including Buddy. This took place around the corner from where I lived in a vestibule which had a stairway. Joey and I sat down at the bottom of the stairway and watched a pro at work. Gert lay down on her back with her head and shoulders on the bottom two steps and raised her legs stiffly in the air. Buddy grabbed both of her ankles, one in each hand, and holding them apart, he lifted her to the level of his crotch. Gert reached out and led him into her. She literally began to climb the steps on her back; with each thrust she mounted another step. They both climaxed at the top of the stairs. Then, still in charge and being the pro that he was, he slid down the stairs all the way, still embracing her, with him on top.

After that rise to fame and slide to glory, Gert’s only interest in us was to get Joey and his big brother to join us.

Gert was sent away by her parents where these things don’t happen. Before she left she told me that her father was going to speak to my father… that’s all I needed.

I did not tell Gert’s father and I am sure she did not. The only one I could think of was a Mr. Gunther. He saw the four of us go into a construction site, he snuck in and caught Gert naked and us making out. He yelled and ran, afraid of being attacked by us. The secret was out, the secret we all knew except her father, and now he knew too. Halloween was fast approaching. A time to even the score.

There was no planned revenge, like burning down his house. It was a matter of whatever presented itself. When Joey Easter and I stepped out from the shadows of the lamplight we could see that no one was home. There was no car in the driveway and the lights in the house were out. No need to rush.

The garden hose was neatly rolled up in the driveway, coupled to an active faucet. I turned the nozzle to the open position and gently tapped it through the lower pane, feeding six feet of hose into the house. I turned on the faucet, and Joey and I left.

Rocky, a punch drunk cauliflower-eared ex-boxer, who worked for a private security company was making inquiries the next day. Rocky never stood still, even when he stood in one place, he rocked back and forth on his heels. I knew with Rocky on the investigating committee, they would probably blame it on a squirrel.

A Jolly Fourth of July

When I was twelve, Joey Easter was my best friend. His stepbrother, Buddy, kept his father’s name. He wanted to be known as Buddy Wiggens, not Buddy Easter.

Joey, his father, stepmother, stepbrother, and his father’s mother all lived up-stairs from us. We lived in the back of my parents’ dry goods store in Hollis, Long Island.

On the morning of July 4th, 1927, Joey and I went up to the roof of our two-story building. We could see Grandmother Easter who was enjoying the late morning sun sitting on a chair near the building. She was waiting for a visit from her two grandchildren, Fred and Adele.

Joey and I had a string of one-inch firecrackers, joined together by a fuse. We laid them on the front parapet of the building and lit them. The burst of the first firecracker blew the rest of them off of the parapet and down onto the old lady’s lap, where they began to explode like a machine gun in heat. The grandmother nearly died from fright. Joey and I quickly disappeared through the trap door, down the long ladder to the inside stairway, through his apartment to the back bedroom, and down the drainpipe to the yard below. From there we rounded the corner and walked calmly towards the gathering of bewildered family who were trying to bring the old lady to.

When she was finally