The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read online

  I usually ended up in Washington Park after wandering through the prosperous streets abutting it, tacitly offering my services to any beautiful heroine who might be in need of a kid to shinny through her transom. Finally giving up, I would drift into the park where I would stylishly out-fence then ruthlessly decapitate a few weeds with a stick-rapier, chuck pebbles into the man-made lake to see the ripples spread like Mrs Kane’s rumors, then climb the flat-topped artificial hill that had been created out of the spoil from digging the lake it overlooked. Up there, I would be out of sight of the omnipresent truant officers with which my guilt populated the park: truant officers disguised as bums, as park wardens, as old men sunning themselves on benches, maybe even as women pushing baby carriages...the sly rats!

  While the story-weaving and the anticipation of coming across some great adventure were rich and rewarding, the reality of playing hooky was not. It was usually a long, boring day of aimless wandering, and even worse when it rained and I was obliged to spend time in doorways or in dark, silent churches from which I returned home tired, cold and saddened to have been born too late for the great era of discovery and adventure. For lack of anything else to do, I almost always ate my lunch in mid-morning, so by the time I got home I was not only grumpy about being born too late, I was also very hungry.

  After visiting the Schuyler Mansion for our refinement, the Natural History Museum for our understanding, or Washington Park for our spirit of adventure, my sister, mother and I would walk home, playing ‘Name That Tune’ or ‘I Spy’, or trying to avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk while not appearing to do so to anyone who might be watching our progress down the street. It’s hard not to break out laughing as you do this because you have to keep your head up and look down your nose to spot the cracks, which makes you cross-eyed, and you have to take shorter or longer steps while trying to appear perfectly natural. We would arrive at 238 after dark; Mother would make soup and sandwiches; then we would end our perfect day sitting in the dark, listening to the radio. Somehow, radio programs were always best listened to in the dark with only the amber glow of the dial.

  Pearl Street Blues

  MY MEMORIES of Pearl Street are set against seasonal and meteorological backdrops that might be termed ‘folkloristically correct’. Most of the old fairy tales and story books that established the traditional settings for America’s seasons were written and illustrated in New England, where March is indeed windy and April showery, where Halloween obligingly rustles with the ghostly susurrus of crisp fallen leaves and there is a crust of early snow for Thanksgiving. I used to feel sorry for children from the West and the South who were obliged to accept these literary givens despite the evidence of their senses...sweating, sunburned kids in Hawaii or Galveston who had to make do with cotton wool snow for their windows. I felt lucky to have been brought up where the seasons were folkloristically correct.

  Pearl Street, Fall. Illustrations in the dog-eared old primers we used at school showed boys in knickers and girls in pinafores happily jumping through piles of fallen leaves, but our block had no trees to shed leaves, so fall is symbolized for me by the beginning of the school year. Book covers were made from brown paper bags and we bought new notebooks that I promised this year for sure—for sure—I would keep neat and un-scribbled-on, but sooner or later my bored hand would begin to doodle autonomically, and by the time I noticed what I was doing, it was too late, the purity of the notebook was compromised and, on the virgin-or-whore principle, I felt free to fill the notebook with doodles, multiplications of massive numbers, and lists of words from one of my boredom-slaying pastimes, seeing how many words of more than four syllables I could think of beginning with the letter...12

  Pearl Street, Winter. I can envision those eternal narcotized afternoons during my last year at P.S. 5, before Mother transferred me to Our Lady of Angels school because I had been getting bad grades and warnings about my ‘behavior and attitude’ ever since Miss Cox died. Chalk dust hangs in the air, momentarily defining a pale winter sunbeam. Bored, I let my mind drift...drift...my dip pen stops and a furry blot blossoms where the nib touches the paper...my heavy-lidded eyes rest on the unfinished portrait of George Washington that makes him seem to be emerging from clouds...beside him, a limp flag to which we pledge our allegiance every morning, flinging our arms straight out, palms down, as we say ‘...to the flag of the United States of America’. With the coming of the Second World War, the teachers would discontinue this gesture that seemed too close to the Nazi salute, and tell us to keep our hands over our hearts.

  Pearl Street, Spring. A fleeting few weeks between the searching cold of winter and the oppressive heat of summer, Spring was as perilous as it was ephemeral. Although your mother warned you not to, and although you knew from experience that you shouldn’t, you always shed your winter jacket too soon and let your winter-stiff legs stretch as you ran, scudded along from behind by the March wind, and you inevitably ended up with a tenacious head cold. Because she always had a stuffed-up nose, the urban Goddess of Spring pronounced her name ‘Sprig’, and that, for the etymologically curious, is how new spring branches came to be called ‘sprigs’.

  Pearl Street, Summer day. Roller-skating up and down the street to the click-clack of the cracks beneath your wheels as your roller-skate key swings from a string around your neck. We had only one pair of roller skates bought from a woman whose child had died of polio, they were too wide for Anne-Marie and too short for me, but we managed, taking turns, she slipping around on the skates, me with pinched toes. My feet still remember how, when you’ve unclamped the skates from your shoes after hours of skating, the soles of your feet continue to tingle, remembering the pavement.

  Pearl Street, Summer night. People sit on their stoops on hot nights, talking lazily. I walk down the street, looking up at the full moon, which seems to travel with me at the speed of my walk, weaving its way through the power lines, and I wonder if there is another boy in some other town, maybe some foreign country, looking up as he walks and assuming the moon is following him, too.

  And through all seasons, our radio offered Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade and brought the Big Bands to us from dance halls and ballrooms across the nation, providing the songs that formed a musical background for the troubles and joys that textured our lives on North Pearl Street.

  Let’s Face the Music and Dance...

  There’s a Small Hotel...Easy to Love...

  I’ve Got You Under My Skin...

  I Can’t Get Started (with you)...Little Old Lady

  Most of the games kids played on our block were the same as those we had known in Lake George Village. Aside from those anonymous roughhouse games that give boys a chance to knock one another around and barge into clumps of girls, who protest and squeal, but continue to stand about, hoping to be barged into by a boy they think is ‘cute’; boys had marbles and mumblety-peg, both played in the vacant lot beside Kane’s cornerstore where there was some sooty dirt for drawing marble circles and for jack knives to stick into. Quick-handed little girls played jacks on the wide top step of the stoops, or skipped and dipped over chalked hopscotch patterns that blossomed on the sidewalks each morning only to become foot-smudged palimpsests by nightfall. Bigger girls jumped rope to the rhythm of those chants, some modern, topical and ephemeral, others ancient, metaphorical and eternal, that were, and I hope still are, the folk poetry of the slums. Most of these chants ended with counting the number of times ‘Bonnie Johnny kissed ya sistah’ or how often ‘the ghost of Cindy Flinders came a-tappin’ atcha winders’, or the number of crullers the jumper could eat at a sitting, or the number of lovers she would have, or of children, or the number of miles she would run to avoid a certain boy (or to catch another one). The pace and volume of the enumeration rose until the ordeal ended with high-speed ‘hot pepper’ skips that separated the mediocre jumpers from the stars and made frustrated younger sisters yearn to beat triumphant older ones—just once! Soo
n, too soon, the arrival of ‘the curse’ would thrust each girl in turn into gawky, giggling puberty, which would oblige her to scorn both sidewalk games and the insufferable babies who still played them.

  Boys were prohibited by tacit sex taboos from jumping rope, but they could turn the rope for their sisters and their sisters’ friends, so long as they did so with bored, sardonic expressions on their faces and eventually whipped the rope up to trip the girls and spoil their fun. Failure to ruin the game, or turning the rope for anyone who wasn’t your sister, got you teased for being ‘sweet on’ some girl, which obliged you to fight the accuser to prove he was a dirty liar whose pants were on fire.

  As soon as the snow was gone and the sidewalks were dry, baseball cards were brought out onto the street to be swapped and gambled for, three or four boys standing back about five yards from a building and flipping the cards against it. You won the other kids’ cards by getting closest to the wall, or by overlapping them. It was better to overlap, because flipping a card hard enough to get really close to the wall risked denting its corners, thus reducing its swap value. Baseball cards came wrapped up with thin, rectangular, one-for-a-penny slabs of pink gum that tasted like the inside of an old woman’s purse smells, sweet and powdery. This gum didn’t ‘blow’ as well as Fleers, which came as a chubby pink cube wrapped in paper with twisted bow-tie ends and had a waxed ‘funny paper’ with a couple of stale jokes, a riddle, and an ‘amazing fact’, but you didn’t get baseball cards with Fleers, so the sales of this superior bubble gum fell off drastically during the spring card-flipping season.

  You only flipped duplicate cards, never risking one of your collection and hoping through skill and luck to win cards that would fill gaps in your pictures of baseball players arranged by teams. It may seem odd today, but before the Second World War, all the major-league teams of America’s ‘national’ sport were located in cities east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, except for Washington, D.C.’s two teams. In addition to baseball cards there was a series of automobile cards depicting everything from the Model T and the Stutz Bearcat through to the newest ‘airflow’ models, and a series of roplane cards (yes, with that ‘’ ligature) including fragile bi-planes, stumpy Schneider Trophy seaplanes that were little more than motors with cockpits, and modern all-metal planes, like the Ford tri-motor that flew over our street every morning just before school started, causing all the kids to arch their backs and squint up through ‘binoculars’ made of two hollow fists to watch it pass over carrying the airmail south to New York City. But most desirable of all during the spring of 1937 was a new line of ‘War Cards’, gaudy and ghastly images of Japanese atrocities against Chinese women and children that were printed in China and distributed as propaganda to solicit sympathy and assistance in their war against smaller but more modern Japan. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came almost five years later, a whole generation was pre-conditioned to hate the ‘vile Nips’ by these war cards depicting slaughtered children, their mouths agape in silent screams.

  Every kid in Albany played these games, but a game unique to North Pearl Street was ‘ledgey’, in which a ball was aimed at an inch-wide, up-angled decorative ledge across the face of certain buildings on our block, about three feet up from the sidewalk. The bald, flabby tennis ball was thrown so hard that it hit the wall with a hollow fwop! that could be heard a block away. If the ball missed the narrow target of the ledge, as it usually did, it would simply bounce off the wall, and the opponent had to catch it before it bounced a second time. If he failed, the other player got a point and remained ‘at bat’. But when a ball hit the ledge it would arc high, and if the opponent caught it in the air, the other fellow was ‘out’, but if the ball arc’d over the opponent’s head, that counted as a four-point ‘home run’. Because the game depended upon an architectural oddity that was particular to just three houses on our block, ledgey belonged to the kids of North Pearl Street and to no others, and we all became more or less skillful at playing it. One of my early humiliations was discovering that all the boys on the block and most of the girls could beat me at ledgey, which they won through their ability to throw the ball so hard that it was difficult to catch, even a flabby worn-out tennis ball with very little bounce left in it. But slowly over a couple of years I became the street’s best ledgey player despite the fact that most of my adversaries were stronger than I. My advantage lay in wiry quickness and low cunning: I would run my opponents from side to side for a while, then I would place a soft little ball that made them rush forward, almost into the wall, and the best they could manage was a desperate, stabbing catch and a limp return, which gave me a relatively easy shot at the ledge, and if I hit it, the ball would arc out of reach. Home run! Gee, it’s sorta hard to get those high ones, isn’t it. Sorry, pal! Who’s next?

  In time I gained acceptance and even a certain amount of status among the kids of the block. Some of this status was earned by my skill at ledgey, but most of it came from the tough, sassy mouth I developed defensively. People who lived in the buildings with good ledgey facades were driven mad by the constant fwop. They didn’t seem to appreciate the finer points of the game that caused kids to scream and shout outside their windows and occasionally to send a stray ball crashing through one of their panes, instantly dispersing the kids into side alleys and basement doorways as the street became absolutely silent for a few minutes, like a forest after a gunshot. At least once in the course of each animated game somebody would open a window and stick out his head. “Hey! I’m trying to sleep for the love of God! You kids get the hell away from here, you hear me?” I would pull my cap down tight by the brim and remind the complainer that he didn’t own the world, and he’d tell me that I’d better get going if I didn’t want my ass kicked, and I’d say: Oh yeah? You and who’s uncle? Then I’d turn and walk away slowly with an I-don’t-give-a-damn swagger, but quaking inside and ready to take to my heels if I heard the sound of a door being opened. The kids never recognized that my swagger was a cocky sham. “He don’t take shit offa nobody, that kid! He’s like his crazy mother.” Not taking shit offa nobody was an admired quality on Pearl Street.

  North Pearl might have been a sump for society’s lost, damaged and incapable, but my sister and I never felt inferior, not even to those lucky kids in the movies who lived in small towns with big lawns and had wryly benevolent fathers who remembered what rascals they had been when they, too, were young. We didn’t feel inferior because my mother wouldn’t let us. She made it clear that, unlike most of our neighbors, we didn’t belong on North Pearl. Bad luck and the Depression had dumped us there, but we weren’t going to stay. No, sir! One of these days we’d be out of there in a flash. Boy-o-boy just you watch our smoke!

  Society provided our basic shelter and food, but we were on our own when it came to those little extras that separate life from the daily grind of survival, such things as birthday or Christmas presents, or a nice dress for my sister who was very sensitive to clothes and fashion, or the coffee that was my mother’s only hedonistic vice, or special holiday meals like our long-awaited Easter treat of ‘Virginia Baked Spam’ made from two cans of Spam, a small three-slice can of pineapple and a bottle of imitation maple syrup. Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine. It was my job to color the margarine, putting the white, lard-like block into a bowl then sprinkling orange coloring powder over it and mixing with a fork until it was more brazenly yellow than any butter would dare to be. Not until the war came along to absorb all of dairyland’s produce did the butter lobby allow pre-colored margarine onto the market in dairy states like Wisconsin and New York.