may 7, 2014

there was a horse. a golden palomino. ginger. like her color. a perfect, golden palomino. no bridle, no saddle, just naked and free. across the street on valentines road. on the bolson estate. tall oak trees, green grass, and a golden horse. she would come up to the fence and let us pet her. or sometimes, feed her apples. whenever she felt like it. she was there before us. the first horse i remember. probably the first i ever saw. ginger.

we were the newcomers. 1953. i was six years old. my sister had just been born a year before. in levitttown, new york. long island. the first suburb in america. built for GI joes (my dad’s actual name), coming home from world war 2. america was in her first glow of empire glory, one of the world’s two, post-war “super powers”. and after a “depression” and five long and terrible years of a devastating war, her generous GI bill offered her returning soldiers a free education, a job back in the workplace, and a good deal on a house.

and… after another 5 years of president “ike” eisenhower’s buttoned-down prosperity, my parents upgraded again… buying their second and last house on valentines road, just 5-10 miles away from levittown… in westbury, new york. not “old westbury”, home of the sprawling, manicured estates of the whitneys and vanderbuilts, but just plain “westbury”, across from newly built salisbury park and just a 5 minute car ride from the long island railroad, which would take my dad and his commuter neighbors into “the city”, manhattan, five days a week, to “bring home the bacon” to raise their families.

we lived at 1969 valentines road.

so don’t you know, “1969”, the year, was always there… an eternal and momentously long time away… but always… looming, beckoning, inviting me… into my prescripted future. “my son, the doctuh”… that’s what my future held, at least in the eyes of my russian-jewish parents and grandparents who had emigrated to america via ellis island just around the time of the 1917 russian revolution”. little did i know that i would graduate college in 1969, a long-haired and counter cultural “hippie”, with no direction known, and so many light years away from my family’s well-intended expectations.

no, back then, in 1953, my parents, joe and roz, had bought the last of the “model houses” on valentines road for the new suburban development called “birchwood”. ours was a one story “ranch house”, with three bedrooms, a front and back yard, a knotty pine “den”, and an enclosed, mosquito-proof “back porch”. pretty damn luxurious for GI joe and his hard-working neighbors, siegman, rubin, reiss, silverman, and schwartz, all of whom worked in the “schmata”, or garment, industry around broadway and 40th streets in the heart of manhattan.

me and the rest of the kids on valentines road, howie siegman, dennis silverman, roy reiss, arnold rubin, stevie schwartz… we all watched the rest of the neighborhood being built in front of our eyes. from the ground up. first the concrete foundation. then the wooden frames. eventually the glass windows…. all of which we continually and joyously broke with well-aimed stones as fast as we possibly could. it was a wonder to us how they ever finished building the neighborhood. because we used the entire “development” as our back yard, playing king of the hill on the mounds of black earth turned over by yellow “bulldozers”, eventually playing stickball and basketball behind the new elementary school, and i still remember the strange “sexual” feeling of pleasure i felt in my 6 year old groin when i shimmied up the thick metal light posts on birchwood drive.

in a way, we were witness to the first “gentrification” of our neighborhood… even though it wasn’t called that back then, nor would we, or our parents, have known what the word even meant. but where once, eleanor roosevelt was rumored to have grown up, right across the street from us on valentines road, in the big old rickety, white wooden house, right next to the aforementioned bolson estate, both with pitifully-protective fences around their perimeters, our new street was entirely “modern”, built with tiled bathrooms, asphalt streets, air-conditioning, and perfect, all-weather plumbing (or so they thought until the annual hurricanes devastated and collapsed our front yard septic tanks).

so no, we certainly weren’t the whitneys or vanderbuilts, but yeah, we had all the modern conveniences, comforts, and amenities that 1950s america could offer its new, first-time suburban homeowners… on long island, new yawk… all for $18,000 a pop.

but then when i was 12 years old… everything changed. not only school, when we moved from salisbury elementary, right up the street, to w. tresper clarke, the new brick-built high school, a long walk away, but also… childhood itself. you see, what i never knew about birchwood… was that everyone was the same. in a certain way, that is. we were all… jewish.

of course, you knew, just by reading those names above. but me? not really. sure, i already went to “hebrew school” to learn this strange, backwards, phonetically-pronounced language of my ancestors and to prepare for the bar mitzvah i never wanted to have, but i never really understood what it meant. not only the words themselves, which for some idiotic reason, they never taught us the meaning of, but also what it meant… to be jewish.

in 1958, clarke high was only half built. still, with the post war baby boom, salisbury elementary was overflowing with kids, so… they decided to ship us, the 5th graders, mostly from birchwood – to the first completed hallway of clarke. we were the inaugural class. i was in miss locklege’s class. she was a first time teacher with curly red hair and glasses. i had a crush on her.

in her classroom though, i wasn’t so good. i was smart and i was class president but… i was a real wiseguy. maybe because miss locklege was a newbie, or maybe because she was just so nice, but we could always take advantage of her. me and glenn shapiro used to fight, just for fun, every day in class, and even when miss locklege would try to stop us, we’d figure out ways to outsmart her.

like at christmas and hanukah time, we staged a fake fight over a “dreidel” game, where i swore the spinning top came up one hebrew letter, and glenn fought me because he swore it came up another.

of course, miss locklege didn’t know the difference… and we had a great fight. we thought we were pretty clever… until one day, a month or two after the holidays…. we were really out of control and richard franks threw a sneaker that hit…. miss locklege… right in the eye and broke her glasses. she started crying. we didn’t know what to do. you could hear a pin drop. the next thing i know, me and glenn are in the principal, mr. rourke’s, office. damn. that guy never forgot me.

but then, in 1959, the next year, things changed even more. they finished the 2nd hallway of classrooms in clarke, and they bused in a whole different crew of kids. we birchwood kids, who had grown up with each other our whole childhoods, didn’t know any of them. they had names like scalisi and o’farrell. donahue and acerra. bennett mc connor had vaseline all over his pimply face, and even more grease on his slicked-back red hair. these kids were complete aliens to us birchwooders. but… we were all thrown together down the hall in mr. dillon’s class. it was weird, even before we used the word “weird”.

still, i was able to work my magic in the school bathroom, when i made a “deal” with acerra and mc connor to nominate me for class president, if I let them play first base and pitch. i won the “election” even though i’d sort of rigged it myself. i was still popular and i even almost had a girlfriend, lisa delaney, a tomboy with bobbi sox, but little did i know that it was soon to be my last hurrah.

one day, acerra and mc connor, scalisi and dwayne “jungle bunny” graybandt, all kids “from the other side of the tracks”, came over to valentines road. it was a big deal. i didn’t know exactly how, but it was. i introduced them to ginger, the horse. the golden palomino on the bolson estate. i went inside my house while they all waited outside, across the street at the fence, and i got some apples to feed ginger. these were tough kids, but they were afraid of ginger.

they’d never seen a horse before. they thought she’d bite their hands off if they fed her an apple. but i showed them how to do it, with a flat palm, and eventually… they all succeeded, except mc connor. he was still too afraid. but i remember, it was an impressive day. my friends walked all the way over to valentines road, to a neighborhood far away from their own. they fed ginger, the golden palomino, apples. then they walked all the way back to clarke, then all the way home to their own neighborhood. this had never happened before.

___________________________

then one day, my green schwin bicycle got stolen.

i had parked it in the school’s underground garage. at the bike rack like usual. but after school when i went to get it, it wasn’t there. it was such a strange feeling, you know? i was sure where i had locked it, and i was confused when it wasn’t there. i walked home, feeling guilty and empty, and i told my parents. i don’t know what they said to chastise or console me, but the next day, the shit hit the fan.

“hey, look, jimmy, the kike lost his bike.”

“hahahahah,” jimmy biscotti laughed with  martin o’flaherty, the big burly 6th grader, who went on to become state wrestling champion, and even back then in the 6th grade, was intimidating enough for me to keep my mouth shut and just slink on by.

“what’s a kike?” i asked my parents when i got home from school that day.

“who said that?” my mother asked angrily.

“martin o’flaherty,” i told her. i knew he’d said something bad.

this time my dad chimed in equally angrily.

“was he one of your friends over here the other day?”

“no,” i said. “what did i do wrong?”

“nothing. nothing at all.” my father said. “did you tell your teacher?”

“no,” i said defensively. “what for?”

“i want you to tell mr. dillon or mr. sullivan tomorrow,” my mother said pointedly.

“nooo,” i whined. “martin o’flaherty will beat me up and tell all his friends.”

my mother and father looked at each other, like they had to decide how to proceed. like they had to decide whether to give me the bad news.

“do you know what that word means?” my mother asked gravely.

“no, i guess it’s a bad word, huh?”

“yes, it’s a very bad word.”

“what does it mean?” i asked again.”

“it’s just an ugly, mean word that some people use to call jewish people.”

“what for?”

“well,” my mother looked over at my father. “you know about the holocaust, right?”

“yeah.”

“well, you know that hitler and the nazis killed millions of jews during world war 2, right?”

“yeah.”

“well, those people who killed jews and who still hate jews are called anti-semites. and martin o’flaherty is an anti-semite.”

i didn’t know what to say.

“well, how did martin o’flaherty and jimmy biscotti know that i was jewish?”

“that’s a good question,” my father said steadily.

“well, how?” i insisted.

“well, i don’t really know the answer. but probably martin o’flaherty’s parents or… his friends… just knew… somehow… they knew… they know… that you and your friends are… jewish.”

this was a hard lesson i was learning.

“but how could he tell? do i look jewish?”

“i really don’t know, son, but some people think that jewish people have certain features that make them look… jewish.”

“really?” i was just so curious and amazed.

“like what?”

“like….,” my father winced and looked again at my mother. “like…. for example… curly hair and long noses.”

“but i don’t have curly hair or a long nose.”

it was true. i used green, goopy jeris hair tonic, to harden my hair into a part on the left side with a pompadour. and what about my nose? it was just… a nose. what were they talking about?

 

 

but that’s the way i learned. because that wasn’t the first time martin o’flaherty, or his copycat younger brother, gerald o’flaherty, called me “kike” or “yid” or “jew boy”. that wasn’t the first time i had to hold my tongue when they told me “i sucked”… even though i didn’t know what sucking was and when i asked my parents, they didn’t seem to know either. and that wasn’t the first time that me and my birchwood friends, siegman, reiss, silverman, rubin, and schwartz had to endure humiliating, derogatory, and scary anti semitic attacks from the foul mouths and fists of the italian and irish kids “on the other side of the tracks”. hell, i never even wanted to get bar mitzvahed in the first place. and my parents were the only ones on valentines road, and maybe in all of birchwood, who weren’t members of temple sholom with rabbi bernstein and cantor flocker. this wasn’t my fault. i wanted nothing to do with it.

 

after the 6th grade, i was tested out of the general school population and put reluctantly into the “e” program. i think it meant “accelerated” even though they called it the stupid “e” program. i begged my mother not to put me there.

“please, mom, i don’t want to be in classes with nicky blumenthal. he has coke bottle glasses. he doesn’t play any sports. he’s an idiot.”

“eric, son, this is a special program. for smart children. it will give you opportunities that other children don’t have. it will help you get into a good college.”

“i don’t care, mom! please don’t make me go. i’ll lose all my friends. i’ll hate it. i know i will.”

but i went. and i did. hate it. and lose all my friends. bruce acerra became senior class president. bennett mc connor pitched varsity baseball and made the all star team. and they never came over to valentines road again. they all had girlfriends and i never had one. i never went on a date and i never asked jeannie winters to the prom. i became socially awkward. i was ostracized because i was smart. the o’flahertys and the biscottis called me anti-semitic names, and dwayne “jungle bunny” graybandt stopped speaking to me.

and ginger, the horse? the perfect golden palomino? she died. and the fences around the bolson and the roosevelt estates were torn down. and new concrete and asphalt neighborhoods were built in their stead.

and me…?

i grew up….

 

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