Joey Gallo's Lament

Saturday was always the best day. No school.  No worries. You would get up and gobble down breakfast. Maybe some Super Sugar Crisp. Man that was rocket fuel. It had to be 100% sugar. Top it off with a couple of white powdered donuts and a big glass of orange juice. You wiped the white sugar off of your shirt. Or you didn’t. It flew off anyway as you went out to run around with your friends. The gang would meet up in front of the gynie pump in middle of the block. That was the focus of the block. There was a big gang of kids. Different ages but all pretty close in age. We were the baby boomers. Born in the 50’s and we were together all the time. Went to the same Catholic schools. Same church. Same streets. We all knew the same stuff. And that was all we knew. That and no more.

Everybody was Italian. Or least your Ma was Italian. My Da was Irish as was two of the other kids. There was a Greek. And one who was an Americana since his pops came from Kentucky. We were pretty homogenous if you look at it that way. Since we were all the same we sort of all got along. I mean there were fights all the time and we ranked each other out and busted balls unmercifully. We duked it out with other blocks and other neighborhoods. But the guys on Tompkins Place stuck together. Even when you were a weirdo.

We had a couple of kids we considered weirdo’s. There was Louie Nerve. He was always shouting out curse words and spitting and acting like a dick. Now we would say he had Tourette’s syndrome. Back then we just said he was all fucked up.

There was Nancy the Retard. Which she was by the way. I mean she was an actual retard. A Mongoloid kid who lived in the middle of the block. She was exactly my age and the age of my closet buddies. She always tried to hang around with us. You would think that the kids would be mean to her. But we weren’t. I mean we knew her all our life. And our parents would kick our asses if we were mean. Plus she was fucking strong. I mean Hercules strong. She could beat the shit out of most of us when we were little kids. Not so much anymore as we were just hitting puberty and some of us were getting our growth. That wasn’t an issue anymore. We just made sure to include her when she came out. She couldn’t play fistball or stickball but she was a pretty good stoop ball player and hell on wheels at Sckelly.  Her pudgy fingers would send that bottle cap flying across the board like a rocket and knock your cap right up onto the sidewalk. Things has started to change in the last couple of years. Most of the girls stopped with the street games. Even the tomboys. That summer were into combing their hair into long straight hairdo’s like Joni Mitchell and Marianne Faithful. The girls were all about make-up and giggling and fighting amongst themselves about some bullshit we didn’t understand. Except for Nancy the Retard. She just stuck with her Pete Rose haircut and tried to hang out with the gang.

The weirdest of the kids was Jacob. Jacob Golden. He was the only Jew on the block. Maybe even in the neighborhood. His Mom had bought old man Russo’s house after he died. She was some sort of big shot professor at Brooklyn Law and all the ladies on the block hated her. Not because she was Jewish. Well not “just” because she was Jewish. She was divorced! And she worked. Short and skinny and mean. Smelled like cheap wine and cigarettes. And weed. Left her kid alone all day and night. He was the original latch key kid. It was even worse than that. She had taken up with a never-do-well type guy that she had met at the college. He was the janitor or something. They weren’t even married. They drank and fought all night long. I mean that wasn’t unusual in the neighborhood. Everybody’s parents fought. Sometimes the wives got smacked around. But Jacob’s Mom was the Smackor not the Smackee. That’s lawyer talk. Which she was quick to throw out whenever she dealt with normal people. So most of us kinda felt sorry for Jacob. I mean we still busted his balls all the time. He was a skinny fuck and too quick to run his mouth. But we included him in our games because we felt sorry that his Mom was such a nasty cunt.

This particular Saturday we started out playing stoopball. That’s where you take your spaldeen and bounce it off the bottom step of a stoop. You scored based on where the ball went. If the team on the field caught it you made an out. Usually we said if you hit six foul balls you made an out. But if you hit it right and it went right across the street to the opposite side you got a hit. If it hit the side walk it was a single. If it went into the area gate it was a double. If it hit the building across the street it was a home run. You almost never did that. Which was good because if you hit a window you had a good chance to break it.

Stoop ball was good because you could have any number of players as long as you had two. So you started out and as more guys showed up you added them to the teams. Once we had enough guys we would choose up a game of fist ball. Then you would switch to a pimple ball. That was easier to hit with your fist and didn’t hurt so much. You saved the spaldeen’s for stoop ball and stick ball because they would really fly. Plus the pimple was cheaper and we were always losing them. You played fistball like baseball in the middle of the street. You just didn’t have a bat or even a stick like in stickball. You just threw the ball up and punched it as hard as you could and ran the bases. Which were always a car for 1^st and 3^rd and a sewer cover for second. I was a pretty good player. Not the best but not the worst. That was Jacob. He was even worse than the Retard.

It wasn’t good for his self-esteem. I guess it was a good thing that we didn’t know what the fuck self-esteem meant back in those days. Otherwise more of us would have been depressed.