JERSEY BOYS OF SUMMERS PAST

Shadows sink from the awning of the outstretched arms of the tremendous oak tree and dance at my feet as I sit in my deck chair, gin and tonic in hand, thinking and remembering. On this July afternoon, it’s those priceless summers of the ‘70’s. For you, it may be the summer of the 60’s, 50’s, 40’s, or 30’s. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that every summer of our youth called us forth to fill its empty days with possibility. In the end, we’re left with a string of bloated golden moments hemorrhaging meaning and memory.

The recognizable scent of Coppertone makes me want to do the Jersey Jig and shake the sand from my swimsuit; air perfumed by sausage and peppers summons crowds on Lower Main Street in Fort Lee feasting at the Feast of Saint Rocco. The other day I was sitting in my mother’s kitchen when the sight of her dust mop leaning against the wall conjured summer days long gone. Her threatening screams, “Did your brother take the handle of my dust mop for a stickball game?” echoed in my head.

Then the other day I was in Modell’s with my son roaming the aisles when I came upon a box with a big sign that read, “Stickball Bats.” I started to laugh thinking, “Really? They’re selling mop handles?” Then I saw the price tag and gulped. $25 for a mop handle?  Yes, $25 for a mop handle. If our moms had any foresight, they would be millionairesses now and could afford to hire someone to mop their floors.

          We never know what event can trigger memory, but for the tanned Jersey boys of summer’s past, now burdened by responsibilities they never anticipated, it’s got to be stickball. Stickball was, perhaps, the greatest of any unorganized sport. You didn’t have to try out for it, you didn’t have to wait for field time, and you didn’t have to buy any special equipment—all you needed was a mom with a mop, tape for the handle, and a pink Spaulding Hi-Bounce rubber ball from Feiler’s or County Discount. Stickball was a pick-up game that could be played pretty much anywhere.

That distinctive hollow pop of the pink rubber ball perfectly connecting with the wood of someone’s mother’s pilfered mop or broom handle; a fusion of excited voices caught midway between youth and manhood; the scraping of black converse high-tops upon the sun soaked gravel; the crack of the bat splitting the ball in half—one part dropping dead to the ground, the other hurling through the air like a spastic spaceship.

The boys from Fort Lee, Englewood Cliffs, Cliffside Park, Palisades Park, Leonia, Edgewater, Fairview, North Bergen, West New York and all towns in-between all had one thing in common (other than their paper routes)--stickball. For Jersey boys, all you needed was a wall to draw a batting box on, or a chain-link fence to string out a box, and a Spaulding. In Fort Lee there was the handball wall of Sixth Street Park, the handball wall of Holy Trinity’s field (anyone in Coytesville remember that?); the south facing red-brick wall of Madonna’s CYO Hall; Westview Park’s chain-linked fence.

In the summer of 1978, my best friend, Mary Lutz, created what was to become the great batting box mystery of Westview Park. For 32 years it’s been a cold case. Until now. In retaliation for her Frisbee interrupting Bobby Peterkin’s perfect pitch, one of the boys indiscriminately tossed it onto the roof of an elderly gentleman’s house. As cranky as he could be, he told Mary that her lousy Frisbee could rot on his shingled roof before he retrieved it for one of us hoodlums. In an act of pure vengeance, beneath the cover of night with only me by her side, Mary withdrew her pocket knife from the pocket of her Levi cut-offs and severed the ties of John Pagano’s meticulously twined batting box. The wrath of all the neighborhood boys greeted us the next day. These pious, genuflecting altar boys promised that the perpetrators of such a heinous crime would be shown no mercy. No suspects were ever charged.

So here’s to all those Jersey boys of summers past and their stickball games, especially the boys from Westview Park who waited 32 years for their case to be solved. Ah, memory…

UNCHAINED MEMORIES

Wide awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, waiting for the impending snow storm of the century, all I can think about are snow tires; more specifically those old snow tires that had chains. It seems that the further the years take me away from my primitive past, the more it re-appears to haunt me at the oddest, most inconvenient hours of the night.

          Most normal people, when they think back to their snowy youth, remember sleigh riding, hot cocoa, warm fires. I, however, think of unplowed streets, lack of traction, and my old man’s furrowed brow as seen from the rearview mirror as he ordered my little foot to “GIVE IT GAS!” while shouldering the Falcon out of an uneven snow drift as the tire spit a violent deluge of snow into his unprotected face. The roar of the revving engine drowning out the gusts of profanity emitted in puffy clouds of steam from his mouth like the winds of Poseidon.

Winter was not my old man’s season of choice. In fact, before he married he followed the sun south every winter to pre-Castro Cuba where he caddied for all the swells who treated him swell. His Havana stories always included lots of money in his pockets, midnight poker games in smoky dim-lit backrooms of bars, a colorful array of zoot suits, hand-rolled cigars, and iced rum served free to the high-rollers by hard-drinking bartenders. His stories entertained my imagination, and whenever Carmen Miranda or Ricky Ricardo came on T.V. he’d hum nostalgically along to their music while his eyes mourned the loss of those long, lazy Cuban dias of winters past.      

But to the northeast he permanently returned, never quite reconciling himself to the cold. I remember once, towards the end of his life when he was very sick but would let no one outside of his family know, there was a raging blizzard and he was late coming home from work. Worried that he might be stuck somewhere because the chained snow tires weren’t yet on his car, my mother sent me out on foot to find him. I walked north on Lemoine Avenue, the heart of the Coytesville section of Fort Lee, my head bent low to shield my face from the slash of whipping sleet. I passed Holy Trinity Church; passed the white-steepled First Reformed Church; passed the “Lunch Box”; passed “Bobanell’s Liquors.” I paused before the rectangular front window of “Randall’s Bar,” the last of the neighborhood saloons. I peered as best as my snow-blurred eyes could into the window, envying the shadows of the few bodies I saw standing around the bar.

As I surged on, something familiar struck me. “Did I see the silhouette of a pinky being raised with a shot glass?” I turned around and followed the grooved footprints of my snowboots back to the bar. I looked past my neon reflection and examined the patrons. A hand waved. It was my father’s hand.

As I crossed the entrance, the rush of intense heat magnetically pulled me towards the belly of the bar. There, regaling the neighborhood boys from Fort Lee Firehouse #2 with his incredible stories, stood my dear old man waving a shot glass of whiskey in the air as if it was a beacon light piloting lost travelers to safe harbors. He handed me the glass of amber liquor and said, “Here’s to your health!” As the whiskey travelled down my throat, tears swelled in my eyes. Not because the whiskey burned, not because I was wet and cold, not because I had expected to find him dead in the raging storm. No; tears choked me because I knew that this was the last perfect moment I would ever spend warm and safe by my father’s side. He died the following Fall, leaving this earth long before the winds of winter set in.  

           My father taught me that chains on your tires keep you gravitated to the earth when you feel like you’ve lost your footing. And it’s my memories of him that gravitate me to this earth when I feel like I’ve lost my footing and life is spinning out of control; a safe, warm harbor in the midst of raging storms.