War

Every body played war, me and all my friends, my sister Jo, cousins Janise and Linda, and Frankie’s sister, even Wayne and his friend, even Yudock. Not the hillbillies. We never played with the hillbillies. Not Byron or his brother either, but everybody else, except Fat Georgie and Monica, because they couldn’t get dirty.

All the girls were nurses on one of the flatbeds parked in the truck lot next to Pumpilio’s garage. That was the field hospital.

We fought the Japs or the Germans but usually the Japs because Japs was better to say and my grand mother was German. She was dead but I still didn’t like killing people like her and I didn’t know any Japs and they had slanty eyes and were different so they were easier to kill especially when I got my fifty caliber machine gun an I could kill a lot at one time. It was okay to kill commies too, but you had to play spy to kill them. Indians too, sometimes, but sometimes it was fun to be the Indian.

Getting shot or blown up was the most fun if every body was on the same side fighting the enemy. I charged across the battlefield and get shot. It was hard to be good at getting shot. You ran as fast as you can and then just had to kind of stop doing anything except yelling you were hit and grabbing were you got shot and letting your self go flying at the cinders. Getting blown up was almost the same except you had to jump first before you let yourself go.

Yudock was terrible at it. He stopped running and lay down on the ground and roll around in agony forever. You were supposed to lay there and weakly wave your arm around and moan a little until the girls came and dragged you to the flat be and operated.

Sometime you had to recover enough to help get up on the truck bed but then you got worse and the nurse pinch you digging out the bullet or shrapnel and nurse you back to health and you fell in love with the nurse and she would cry when you went back to the war and she had to kiss you and you had to let her and not wipe it off. Sometimes you died and she put a towel over your head. She didn’t have to kiss you when you died but she had to cross her arms and sort of fall on you and then cry. But then you got cured by a miracle and then went back to the war so you could get shot and dragged back again.

One time the operation was real. Throwing yourself head long onto a cinder covered truck lot can be hazardous. Cinders have some sharp edges. My sister, secretly gleeful at the opportunity, dug a piece out of my forearm with a tweezers while I valiantly tried not to cry. Janise and Linda watched. I had to get kissed by all of them, three Florence Nightingale’s.

Old Horse

The ragman and the knife sharpener man both came down the street in horse drawn wagons, yelling to let people know they were coming. It was nice yelling, like singing, like the Italian Ice man in Peanut Park pushing his cart. “Rags. Rags for sale. Rags,” the rag man sang. And you could hear the clop clop of his horse pulling the wagon all heaped up with bundles of rags.

Their horses, the ragman’s and the knife sharpener man’s, were older than they were with grey stiff hair in their coats and a slow walk like they had one more step in them before they died, but they kept going. “Ready for the glue factory,” uncle John said. I couldn’t figure out how they make glue out of horses. I imagined them going through a big sausage grinder and coming out glue. They had to kill them first. Hit them in the head with a sledge hammer like cows. I wouldn’t like that job. Your arm would get tired and then you couldn’t hit them right and you’d have to keep hitting the over and over until they were dead.

The horses had blinders on, to keep them from getting scared, the ragman said. I wonder if they left them on when they went to the factory, so you could sneak up on them? The horses stood there tied to the wagons, snuffing, shaking their flanks and swishing there tales against the flies.

“Whoa. Whoa,” the men said quiet like, and the horse would swish its tail.

The rag man’s horse’s name was Betty. Old Bet. I was allowed to pet her but not to close to her mouth. She liked to bite. Sometimes she would go poo right there in the street. No one would say anything and she’d just swish her tail. She didn’t seem to mind the bit in her mouth but it looked like it hurted. Rags were a nickel a bundle and sometime we changed dirty ones for clean ones.

When they came I ran and told my ma. For the ragman she gave me a nickle to buy some rags. She came out for the knife sharpener man. He had a sharpening wheal on his wagon he rode like a bicycle. His horse didn’t bite and some time my ma give me sugar cubes for him. I could tell he was a boy horse because his thing was giant size. He was older than Betty and his belly hung down and he walked even slower. He pooped in the street too, splatty so it went flat.

The knife sharpener man was missing a bunch of teeth. He peddled his wheel with his tongue sticking out through the spaces. The knifes on the wheel made a loud hissing like sound and he would test to make sure they were sharp by cutting news paper. Then he wrapped each knife up by itself.

His horse’s name was Old Horse. “Gee’up, Old Horse,” he said when he left. Old Horse leaned forward and shook before he started pulling.

Failure To Duck

We were playing spears in the yard, hurling old broom and mop handles at rocks, Laginza’s stockade fence, sticking them in the dirt, and at targets of opportunity. The points became splintered and full of dirt, so when one of them hit me just below my right eye and I burst out in a caterwauling wail and ran for my mother, pieces of the spear came with me.

It is possible I did not pause in my wailing all the way to the doctor’s. I don’t remember how we got there. I do remember the intensity of my crying and screaming and wailing moving up several notches when he came at me with the scalpel to dig things out. Treacherously, I believe my mother held me down. I further believe I must have froze with terror as the evil Doctor Sheletskey dug in my face with his knife. He didn’t get it all. If you look close you can still see two little dark spots.

My mother should have known what she was getting herself into. When I was still in my highchair she turned her back for a minute and turned back around just in time to see me standing and launching myself out of it like Superman. Not even a year old and already I had a pretty good black eye. It was only the first in a long list of bruises, cuts, broken bones, and fights with which I terrorized my mother throughout my childhood. So I suppose she was only getting a little revenge when she held me down so the doctor could dig ineffectively in my face.

Somewhere in there I was told not to cry like a baby and be a big boy. After that I stubbornly refused to smile or say thank you for the suckers with the flexible loop handles he gave me after doctor appointments and the next time we went I ran around the office and screamed like hell when he tried to give me a shot.

This is the same doctor who prescribed Belladonna, also know as Deadly Nightshade, an extremely powerful and dangerous hallucinogenic, to my older sister when she was extremely young.

Homage To The Dead

Sister Thorette wore a wedding ring she told us meant she was married to Jesus. In His name she ruled her kindergarten class at Saint John Cantius, the part of the kingdom of the Living God she had been entrusted with, with an iron hand. She held her big crucifix, dangling from her fingers, like a medieval prison guard holds his keys. She was a big ugly woman with a large hooked nose, a mole on the side of it with black hairs sticking out. Her face, pinched in white sat atop a tall black obelisk. Here eyes were quick, darting, searching out errant children.

You could not see her feet. She seemed to float slowly about the room with her ever-threatening yardstick. It was an all-purpose instrument, a pointer or an attention getter with a surprise rap on a desk. With it she meted out punishment, a rap on the knuckles, or ordered to hold out your hands, on the palms. Punishment was her forte. There was kneeling on your knuckles or bottle caps, the yardstick used on edge, and the mouth washed out with flax soap.

I’ve often called myself the original snot-nosed kid. A half joke is my nose has been running for fifty-eight years. To this day I don’t carry a hankie because my mother used to make me take them to school and within the first half hour the hankie would be used up and I’d have to pull it apart to find a clean spot, leading to much ridicule. As a child I spent winters with snot froze to my upper lip. Consequently, I was forever sniffing snot back up into my head, swallowing it when it got caught in my throat.

Sister Thorette played the piano. Every day at school she gave a little recital for us children. If the good sister believed anything, she believed that good little children should be seen and not heard, that if we were not called on to speak we were to be silent, especially during piano recitals. You know where this is going, don’t you? Enter the snot-nosed-kid.

Sister Thorette was convinced I was a willful, incorrigible, hell bound little troublemaker who refused to stop interrupting her piano playing by deliberately sniffing my nose. After several ignored warnings which I compounded my offence with preposterous excuses and lies, she took matters in hand, actually my ear. With a stern warning to my class mates she marched me out of the classroom to the long white porcelain sink out into the hall and began administered to me a daily communion of brown flax soap in an attempt to wash the devil from my mouth.

After a few weeks or so, she gave up in disgust. She had confirmed she was correct in her assessment. I obstinately refused to stop my sniffing. When I vomited, either from the soap or snot, it was further proof of my disobedient nature. Even the Lord was punishing me for my sins.

One day the oldest nun in the convent died and was laid out in Saint John's church. The whole school, class by class, was assembled and trouped over to the church pay our respects. One by one we were ushered to the shrunken corpse with garish, roughed cheeks, like shriveled apples. I think there was some kind of step stool over the kneeler. I could see her ruined face down in the coffin. I remember the thick smell of flowers, incense, and wax. I remember the pressure of Sister Thorette’s hand on my shoulder and neck.

“Kiss the sister on the lips and step down.”

I think I remember that, but what came next I’m unsure of. I know I didn’t want to kiss the corpse. I think I was forced. I don’t really know. One by one Sister Thorette motioned us forward, to where she stood besides the casket, to pay our respects to the dead, to the long line of black robed women who came before, to those yet to come, and to those present who tried to bare the weight of sacrifice and service as wives of the Most High God.

Angelo

Angelo lived in the red brick two-flat above Yudock. He used to take pot shots at us with his lever-action bb gun from his back porch sometime when we wandered too close in the truck lot. Little puffs of dust would jump up around us in the cinders, or we’d get a little sting. He thought it was funny and he laughed and called us out for not paying attention to where we were going, as if it was his civic duty to keep us on our toes.

He had a shooting range set up were he set bottles or soup cans on the two by four cross piece inside his enclosed back porch and shoot at them from the other side his wobbly Formica-topped kitchen table with the chrome band and legs. He’d work the action sitting padded chrome chair and take aim with his elbows on the table.

If he was in a good mood and we braved his test of courage of shooting by our feet as we climbed the back stairs to his flat, he cocked the gun for us and let us take a few shots over the table, through the open back door and into the back porch to the bottles on the ledge. If he was in a bad move we never got to the stairs. Fruit crates under the ledge for the bottles caught most of the broken glass. The rest crunch under our sneakers as we came inside.

There was usually empty Campbell chicken noodle soup cans on the white gas stove and table and dirty pots and dishes in the porcelain covered, cast iron sink. It was the kind with the molded, fluted water trap flowing into the sink. It sat on top a cabinet with one door hanging crooked and several spots of rust were the porcelain was chipped and around the drain. There was almost no furniture and what was there was pretty ratty.

If he didn’t break them first, he gave us pop bottle when we were out collecting them for deposit money. We had to pass the test for the pop bottles two. He usually didn’t hit us. When he did it was a pretty good sting and once he had to dig one out of Frankie’s arm. When he hit us he said he was sorry a lot and pleaded and threatened for us not to tell and blamed us cause he wouldn’t have hit us if we weren’t moving and jumping all over the place like scared little girls.

He looked like the rest of us, a skinny kid with a buzz-cut wearing a dago-t. We all looked pretty much the same except for fat Georgie and that we were different sizes, generally according to our ages. All of us were tan in the summers from always running in the streets, dirt smudged from living in the grimy neighborhood. I think he was twelve or fourteen years old and he was my cousin Wayne’s friend and died in Viet Nam.

Fradey Cat

It was a hot Forth of July night. Earlier, while playing, I had fallen in the debris filled trench between Yudock’s and the path behind the semis in the truck lot across Peoria street. Now, the streetlights were on making zigzag orbs of yellow light down the block. Everybody was out on their porches. The big porch outside my aunt and uncles red brick two flat was filled with my mom’s side of the family, pretty sisters in flower print dresses and husbands in dago tees. My mom’s brothers were there with their wives, too.

The older kids were still out running in the streets. Us younger ones were confined to the porch and the side walk in front. My sister Laura and cousin Karen must have been babies in their mother’s arms, or maybe inside, watched by Carol or Sharon, there brother Donald off in the military maybe.

The air was filled with the acrid smoke of fireworks, the smell of diesel fuel, pops and bangs and the whistle of pop bottle rockets, voices of the neighborhood.
I was in my short pant pajamas, both knees and an elbow bandaged from my fall in the trench, waving sparklers. My sister in some frilly dress, playing grown up, sat on the bench next to my mom swinging her saddle shoes instating trouble, telling my mom I wasn’t being careful with my sparkler. I stuck out me tongue at her.

My father yelled at me not to stick out my tongue at my sister and I’d better behave if I didn’t want a lickin.

I sat on the edged of the porch and pouted because I couldn’t do nuthin with out my dumb sister getting me in trouble and I decided to run away.

The next morning I remembered what I was going to do and I told my mom in the kitchen I didn’t like it there any more so I was going to run away.

“Let me make you a sandwich so you don’t get hungry. Go get me a long stick while you’re waiting.”

Boy, I thought. She don’t even care. When I got back with the stick she wrapped the sandwich and some cookies in and old babushka and tied it to the end of the stick and handed it to me. I was stuck and had to run away them.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Don’t stay out past the whistle,” she said.

I went grumbling up the gangway and stomped up to street level. I look both ways and crossed over to the truck lot, kicked cinders to the furniture factory. I crossed under the railroad tracks and came out by yellow cab and made my way north to Chicago Avenue. I made my way east to the iron bridge over the river with Montgomery Wards on the other side. It was the farthest from home I’d been by myself.

It was a long way across the bridge. I had seen them open before, separated in the middle the section sticking up into the sky like gigantic metal jaws. Turning back was humiliating. I was a little fradey cat, just like my sister said.

Some Things We Did.

Pop bottle deposits were a source of spending money for ice cream and candy bars, Kayo’s, a chocolate flavored drink, or Nehi sodas. With our wagons, Frankie and I would scour the neighborhood for pop bottles, Two cents for the 12 ounce bottles and a whole nickel for the quarts, but the quart bottles were very rare. Sometime we made a pretty good haul at the furniture factory where uncle Stanley’s brother, Johnny, worked.

I don’t remember how much things cost but a wagonload would get us both a pop and something else at the butchers and there was always the penny candies in small bins inside the glass counter full of smeared finger prints, no matter how much the butcher told us not to touch the glass. I wasn’t supposed to get any of the ones with out wrappers. We’d get our stuff and go around the corner on Huron and sit in the entry bay with two locked door at JP Shmidts. I don’t know why but some times there was chicken feet in there and we got sticks to push them into the street before we sat down and see who could drink their Kayo’s the fastest.

I was a shoeshine boy for a summer or two. My dad made me a box for paste and brushes and rags. It had a place to put your foot up on and a strap for carrying it over my shoulder. I gave a pretty good spit shine for a nickel. I’d set up at the bottom of the metal stairs leading to the el platform over past Checker cab.

“Shine, Mister? Only a nickel.”

Sometimes in the summer with my sister and cousins Janise and Linda, we’d set up a Kool-Aid stand there. Me and Janise and Linda played a lot together. We tried to get my sister to come out and play but most of the time she just wanted to sit around and draw.

Sometimes we went to Montgomery Wards to the top floor to look out the big windows down at the river and the tug boat pushing big barges of coal. I was afraid of the bridge we had to cross to get there and would make my sister hold my hand. In the middle she would shout, “The bridge is opening,” yank her hand free and run the rest of the way across.

I guess she was paying me back for the winter when my nose would constantly run and on the way home from school sometimes when I got mad at her for telling me to quit sniffling and blow my nose I blew it on her dress.