Читать книгу Fish Out of Agua: - Michele Carlo - Страница 21

“Hey, look, it’s the Speck!” Another slight; another summer.

For two years now, we had lived on St. Peter’s Avenue in that Italian/Irish/German/Polish neighborhood where we had been the first Latin family ever to live there and where they had once complained to my father every chance they got that our food stank, our music was too loud, and my brother Kevin and I ran wild through the halls. It didn’t matter that my mother fed us Wonder Bread, instant mashed potatoes, and Stove Top stuffing, that the only music we ever listened to was Hugh Maskela, the Fifth Dimension, and 77 WABC Music Radio’s Cousin Brucie’s Top Ten Countdown, and that Kevin and I were not allowed to play in the hallways at all. I suppose someone had to be blamed for the relentless rock music (when everyone knew Puerto Ricans listened to Santana, thank you very much), the stench of burnt garlic (not all Italians can cook), and the junkyard of broken Tonka trucks and half-melted Crawly Creepers abandoned on the stairs (a pig wearing lipstick is still…).

Maybe some kids did play inside their buildings, but once summer came, all the neighborhood kids were encouraged, persuaded, or forced out of their houses or apartments to the playground up the block every day, starting immediately after breakfast until dinnertime at 6:00 P.M.

Welcome to the summer of 1969, when telephones were in the kitchen and water came from faucets; video games and cable TV had yet to be invented; hippies were getting ready for their legendary three-day music and mud-fest; and children actually played outside for eight or ten hours a day—tender, innocent, wholesome games…

Marijuana, marijuana, LSD, LSD!

Rockefeller makes it, Mayor Lindsay takes it,

Why can’t we, why can’t we…”

It was ten-thirty, maybe eleven o’clock in the morning. I was nine years old and standing in the middle of St. Peter’s playground. I was watching a group of kids on what we called a sliding pond (a slide) play a game I really, really, really hope no child anywhere plays at all, anymore, ever, called “Nigger on the Bus.”

“Hey, Speck, you wanna play? You can be our nigger. Bwaaaaah!”

To play this game three kids would first go down the slide, each alternately swinging their legs over the opposite sides when they reached the bottom and staying put. But the game didn’t “officially” start until a fourth kid slid down. Everyone would start the chant again as the fourth kid slid down as hard as he or she could with the sole intention of trying to knock as many of the bottom kids off the slide as possible. As more kids joined in the game, the stakes increased exponentially. Soon there were a dozen kids running and climbing, screaming, sliding, and falling.

“Oh no, here comes Fat Pat! Fat Pat, Fat Pat, the Sewer Rat!”

Fat Pat, a.k.a. Pasquale Baleena, was black of hair, swarthy of skin. Ten years old and the unofficial despot ruler of St. Peter’s Park, he seemed not to notice his name’s prefix as he lumbered up the steps. He was the boy who had branded me as “The Speck” back when I was in second grade because, as he told everyone, “She’s too small to be a regular spic.”

As Fat Pat reached the top, he took a moment to catch his breath, savoring the mounting unease from the squirming bodies below, and then he yelled, “Nigger on the bus! Nigger on the bus!” and flung himself down the shiny silver path of ruin. The irrefutable laws of physics and gravity took over, and as his mammoth haunches collided with the spindly frames of the next-closest children, a sort of domino effect took over. Five, six, seven kids were catapulted off and over the slide, landing on the concrete below.

“Ow! Ow! Owwwwwwwww!” the kids yelled as they assessed their damages: a scraped knee, a twisted finger, a shard of glass sticking out of a calf. Make no mistake, in our minds these were war wounds, just as much as were the tallies of the Viet Cong and U.S. dead and wounded we heard about each night as our parents watched the Huntley / Brinkley Report. Yes, St. Peter’s Park was a playground battlefield. And as always, I was on the wrong side.

“Speck!” Fat Pat flung at me as he went around to start the game again.

The first irony was that Fat Pat, like many of the other kids of Southern Italian heritage in my neighborhood, were two, three, even four shades darker than I was, but that didn’t matter. Since I was a spic, I was The Speck.

The second irony was, from my days behind abuelita’s couch, I knew there were five different words to differentiate the color of one’s skin. There were moreno and negrito: brown and black, which depending on one’s tonality and prior relationship, were also terms of endearment. Then, there were prieto and tregieño, which have no direct English translation and at the time seemed to me to be nothing more than mildly insulting descriptions much like ugly or stupid. And finally, there was cocolo, which loosely translates to “coconut head.” By no means could cocolo ever be considered nonoffensive. You did not ever call someone a cocolo unless you wanted to start a fistfight.

And the third and most shameful irony? Once I had actually wished that someone, somewhere, would call me a spic—just once—so I would know what it was like to feel that righteous indignation, that justified anger created by that nasty ethnic slur. I had even begged Kittenworld for it. I had imagined I was walking down a street when someone stopped and said, “Look at that spic.” And I said, “What did you say? Spice? Stick? Oh, spic? You think I look Spanish, you think I look Puerto Rican? Yay! Goody! Yippie!” And then Titi Ofelia clapped. It was not one of my finer imaginary moments.

But when it did happen and Fat Pat named me The Speck, I had cried and cried. Because that was the first time I realized I was a double outcast: I didn’t fit in with my family and I didn’t fit in anywhere. And even though not every kid in the neighborhood called me that and even though some of the kids did play with me—when Fat Pat wasn’t around—it still hurt…a lot.

Mister Softee arrived at two o’clock, just in time for lunch. I dug into my culotte’s pocket for the quarter my mother gave me and sat on a side bench with my Blue Gelati Italian ice and wooden spoon, digging at the vaguely lemony stickiness that would turn my tongue a psychedelic turquoise blue.

“Hey, you wanna play jump rope?”

It was a small group of also-misfit girls, Dawn, Nicole and Janey, who the cool kids called faggots, which didn’t mean a homosexual—not at all. Instead, it meant that by your physicality (too thin: Nicole), appendages (glasses, braces or both: Dawn,), or general doofiness (your mother made you wear “skips,” the cheap sneakers that weren’t Keds or PF Flyers: Janey), you, too, were just not cool enough to play Nigger on the Bus.

As for me, I was a bit chubby but wore no appendages and was dressed better than most. My mother took us a few times a year on marathon shopping excursions downtown, to Ohrbach’s and Bloomingdale’s where she’d spend hours scouring the sale and clearance racks for her pastel minidresses, white knee boots, swirly scarves, and clothes for Kevin and me. So no, I did not wear skips.

“We need an end. Donna had to go home.”

“Okay.”

I took one end of the rope, a long piece of dirty clothesline, and the smallest girl, Janey, took the other. We started turning as the metal-mouthed Dawn and splinter-thin Nicole took turns jumping.

Miss Lucy had a baby, she named it Tiny Tim,

She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.

He swam to the bottom, he swam to the top,

Miss Lucy got excited and pulled him out by his cock—tail, ginger ale,

five cents a glass, and if you don’t like it, I’ll shove it up your ass—me no more questions,

I’ll tell you no more lies,

A man got hit with a bowl of shit…How many times?

One, two, three…

This was where little Janey and I started turning the rope as fast as we could because if we could get Dawn and Nicole out before they got to ten, they would have to take the rope. Then, it would be our turn to jump.

“Hey, let’s play Junkie Tag!” Fat Pat yelled from across the park.

This game was based on the popular schoolyard game Freeze Tag—except St. Peter’s Park was three blocks away from a Daytop Village methadone clinic, whose patients were almost exclusively Vietnam War veterans in their early twenties. They would get their doses, then go back to the park and sit on the back benches, where they smoked cigarettes, cursed the U.S. government, and nodded out. But eventually they’d need to go to the store for another pack, and when one or more of them would stand up to attempt the trek across the street to the deli, that was where the game began. Because, being junkies, they couldn’t travel more than a few feet without stopping for a few minutes, tilting forward or sideways like a troop of bandannaed, army-jacketed-even-in-the-summer Leaning Towers of Pissers.

Whenever they were spotted, the call for Junkie Tag would go out. The most daring child would pick a junkie and run as close to him as possible, with the intention of tapping him and then running back to home base. You got extra points if you could knock the cigarette out of his hand without getting hit back.

“Get the fuck outta here! I catch you, I fuck you up…Aw shiiiit!”

Crazy Vinny, leader of the St. Peter’s Junkie/Vet Association, had swatted at me as I—who had not been invited to join the game but who had run out anyway—knocked the half-smoked Kool cigarette out of his hand as he toppled over. He sprawled on the concrete groping for it.

“Fucking kids. Fucking fuck. Aw shiiiiiiit.”

Why had I done it? I couldn’t tell you for certain. Maybe it was because even though I knew saying nigger was wrong; even though I knew that if Darlinda, my Bloodsister, my best school friend had been here, she would have first cried and then fought them, all of them; and even though I really didn’t want to play that stupid, stupid game—still—I wanted to be invited, allowed, welcomed to play with them and not be their nigger—or Speck. I ran back to my new girlfriends, unsure what was going to happen next.

“Hey, watch me,” Janey said. And she ran up to Crazy Vinny and snatched the cigarette off the ground—a bare inch away from his clawing fingers—then ran back to us and took a triumphant puff.

“Want some?” she asked, offering it around. Nicole, Dawn, and I stared at her, half in admiration, half in disgust.

“Ew! Cooties! No wait. Let me get some,” Fat Pat demanded. And he grabbed the nearly burned-out Kool from Janey’s hand.

None of us thought that was strange. Those were the days where two kids would share a cigarette, three would share an RC Cola, four would share a piece of gum. We called it ABC, or already been chewed. But no one got sick. Kids back then never were sick except for maybe sometimes when your mother would make you climb into bed with your cousins who had the German measles in hopes that you would get it and get it over with so they wouldn’t have to pay for the shot.

“The Parky just set up the Nok-Hockey! Who wantsta play? Come on!”

Fat Pat stuck the cigarette butt in his mouth and waddled to the front of the Park House, where the Parky had set up a Nok-Hockey board on the battered, splintered, lone picnic table, shooing off a couple of junkies who had decided to recline there.

Nok-Hockey was the precursor to air hockey and foosball. It was a wide rectangular board divided by red goal lines, with open slots at each end, and a diamond-shaped wooden block in the center. A kid would use an angled stick or her thumb to bounce the round wooden puck off the sides of the box and through the opponent’s slot to score a point. The first person to score eleven points won; seven-nothing was a shutout. First Janey, then Dawn, and Nicole, and then finally I ran to the group, hoping without hope they’d let me play with them. They did. I was thrilled. And I beat both Janey and Dawn, but lost to Fat Pat, mostly because he terrified me too much to shoot straight.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!…Clang.

The bells of St. Peter’s Church across Westchester Avenue announced the changing of the guard. Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!…Clang.

It was six o’clock in the evening. Time for us smaller kids to go home. The teenagers, wearing their fringed and torn bell-bottom jeans, were just starting to come out for the night. They clustered around the swings, opening quarts of Schaefer beer and rolling joints. The junkies had all retreated to their back benches. Yes, God was in his heaven and all was right with the park.

As I left, the song the teenagers had been singing stuck in my mind:

I’m a juvenile delinquent, marijuana do or die,

I smoke with the sailors and I drink with the bums

I wait on the corner till my pickup comes…

Oh I’m a juvenile delinquent…

It all became perfectly clear to me—as clear as the early fingernail moon rising above the roof of my building as I said good-bye to my new friends. Maybe I had to be a Speck, but I had been the one to knock the cigarette out of Crazy Vinny’s hand; that had to count for something. Yes, maybe there was a way to fit in after all.

That night my mother went to her window and speeched. Who knew what had happened that day to set her off? Maybe she had an argument with abuelita or one of my titis. Maybe the cashier at Mary’s Market stared too long at her. I had given up trying to figure it out. I tossed and turned as I tried to get to Kittenworld, but it didn’t come that night or the next. It would be a full month before I realized the kittens would never return.