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…

RE-BIRTH OF A JOY-ZEE GIRL

(Continued)  August 18^th, 1980: “I can’t wait to be gone. Gone from this place; gone from this town where everyone knows everything about everyone. In this place nothing ever changes; people only die.”

I read the words of that teenage girl now from the distance of many years, and I can’t help but shudder. How could I have so thoughtlessly wished my life, and all that would ever hold any real meaning in it, away like that?

Teenagers are a funny species; they crave change while hating change. At the time I wrote those words change was happening to everyone but me. Old friendships were abandoned for new ones; friends moved away because their parents sold their houses to cash in on the real estate boom; being offered $150,000 for a triple lot seemed a once in a lifetime opportunity.  As ties began to unbind, I was beginning to feel lost at home. Finally, I was the only one still here. Leaving is always easy when you’re the last one to go.  

Eventually, I took a job in Manhattan and lost myself to the gritty intensity of midtown in the days before Mickey Mouse evicted O. Henry from Times Square. The city streets were filled with unfamiliar faces and people who knew nothing about me. Everyone came from somewhere else. And for awhile, that was intoxicating.

Then something remarkable happened. I realized that in my quest to flee everything familiar, I had surrendered all that was really meaningful. Suddenly I began to look upon my past with increasing fondness. The memories I had of growing up in that little part of town creviced themselves into a signifi­cant place in my history and became the stories I would tell.  It seems so important now—all the people and places that populated my small world back then. Sixth Street Park; Jim’s; Stanley’s candy in the back of the laundromat; Monsignor Reilly; Holy Trinity; the Palisades…all of it wished away by a young girl whose firm opinion of time was that it moved too slow.

Had I known in the summer of 1980 that my father would die in six years, I would have never left his side. Had I known that so many of the friends with whom I spent every waking moment with in the summer of 1980 would lose their lives to drugs, car accidents, cancer, murder…I would have never let the distance of time and place consign our friendships to the yearly distribution of Christmas greeting cards.   

There is a tremendous power in the past; meaning that we can only discov­er about ourselves through the passage of time and the loss of those we love, or once loved, most. It’s only when so much has been taken away that we realize how much we really had to begin with.

          I’ve returned to roam the streets I knew so well in an attempt to stir the trace remains of memory; not for the big events, but for those small subtle moments that now seem anything but ordinary. What I find instead are monstrous duplexes on tree-less streets where small shingled houses once stood; stillness where children once ran boisterously through fenceless backyards every hot summer evening while the music of ice cubes mingling in our parents gin and tonics chimed in the background; office buildings where hand-made forts and tree houses were once built.

Look­ing back to those days, those sacred days, as I so often do now, I confess that I carry within me home­sick­ness for those days, that place, all those people, and I remember events that may not, in fact, have happened as elo­quently as I now remember them. I realize with great regret that I spent the first half of my life counting down the days until I could shed my little corner of the earth from my skin only to spend the rest of my life trying to find my way back home again.

I'd like to think that some­where in the dis­tance between memory and truth those days were really as spe­cial as I remem­ber. That in the midst of memory all those people who came of age in that place called Coytesville, are still living and breathing some­where in time.