Shelley Hirsch: O Little Town of East New York (1994)
© Shelley Hirsch, 1994 All rights reserved.
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On The Far Reaches
544 Hemlock Street. 544 Hemlock Street. 544 Hemlock Street. Four stories high and our family moved to the top. And there were four kids in my family and we had four rooms. The kitchen had copper and turquoise stenciled walls and there were two bedrooms. One of them was coral colored and the other one was lilac. In the living room there was a window that looked out onto a courtyard and we shared a clothes line with the people across the way... and we'd have conversations when we were pulling in or putting out the wash. And everybody at 544 listened to music. All different kinds of music seeped out of everyone's apartment and blended together in the hallway. George Rifkin used to sit behind his doorway playing his trapset. He had a little goatee and he looked a lot like Mitch Miller and he had a wife named Rae Rifkin who had peroxided blonde hair. And the whole family wore sweatshirts. Johnny Wilson was a policeman and he had big muscles on his arms and he and his Italian wife Dotty used to invite our family over for Eggplant Parmigiana, and the women had weekly get-togethers, they'd have Tupperware parties, they'd play Mah Jong. Mom always wore the best Chinese lounging pajamas. And at Christmas time, Dad dressed up as Santa Claus and he'd tell stories to all the kids in the building. The Dinnersteins, the Donnellys, the Baskins, the Boscos, the Blooms, the Rizzos, the Schneidermans, Mrs. Konecky and Miss Lynch all mingled in the hallways. With the tiled floors and the marble steps, and the wooden banisters us kids used to slide down. And it was like being in some kind of city cavern, the way it echoed and everything. 544 Hemlock Street. Marcia Baskin Marcia Baskin's house always had the smell of chicken soup. Her mother was always boiling it. They always had it every Friday... boiled chicken yick! And you know what? When Kennedy was being assassinated on TV, Marcia was over there in the bathtub having her pimples picked. I had ringlets in my hair. My mother used to comb my hair and make these big banana curls. That's what I was doing, waiting for them to dry when Kennedy died. Hymie And Harry Hymie and Harry were the fruit man and the butcher respectively. And they had a little store together over there on Pitkin Avenue. I'd go there to buy things, and there's a bakery too! You can get a little cornbread. I take out the middle slice because its soooo good to eat it and then you stick it together and no one knows what you've done! "Fairytales can come true it can happen to you if you're young at heart!" Claire There's something going on with Claire! She's so sexy! She has a very chubby daughter named Rhonda, but Claire! She's like a movie star! Her husband Milton's kind of chubby too and he wears glasses, but Claire! They listen to Yma Sumac! God she's so hip! My father told me he was at a party with her and he tried to kiss her! She's gorgeous! I Put On Shows I put on shows in the courtyard. There were no trees or anything so, like, it was easy. The people in the houses up above us had a really good view. I was Sue Starrthe dancing fashion designer and I cried when I announced that Dotty Bloom let me wear her dress. Oh, I criiiiiiiied! Thanks Dot. Killing The Ants We're killing the ants. We're dropping the ball on the line and we're killing the ants. We're gonna kill the caterpillars too. And then we're gonna kill you, we're gonna kill you, we're gonna kill you! Awright ma I'm coming! Singing With Johnny "Come to me now that I have found you. My desire is that I surround you. Don't be afraid for love to come to you. My lover come to me. Lover come to me. Come to me." The Fire Hydrants Are Spewing Forth The fire hydrants are spewing forth! ...Honey, get in the car. Get in the car! ...Steve, Steve. ...Love them jelly apples. ...Oh, your shoes are looking beautiful, beautiful... Mrs. McIntyre/Chrysler Mrs. McIntyre is the teacher of the class at Public School 159. Her husband works as an executive in some "Chrysler Building" in Manhattan and she goes to community meetings! Isn't it nice of her to come to our little neighborhood to teach our class? Mrs. McIntyre/Bananas Now children! There is going to be a new child coming into your class! Aida Vidzer. She's spent a number of years living in Brazil. My husband and I took a little trip to Rio recently! Now don't forget about all the trees you've learned about in your textbooks! Bananas grow in Brazil, don't forget it! Aida Vidzer (I Liked Her) Aida Vidzer, I met her in the sixth grade. She was born in Montreal, but she and her Polish mother Bessie and her Russian father Jacob moved to Argentina when Aida was three. To Argentina, where her little brother Fivalla was born and then they lived in Brazil. The jungles of Brazil. On Aida's tenth birthday the Vidzers moved to Coney Island and then, a year later, they moved to East New York. And from the moment she was introduced as the new pupil in my sixth grade class, I could tell that there was something special about her. I liked her, I liked her alot. She had blue, blue almond eyes and bangs that covered her eyebrows and she spoke with an accent. At first she wore clothes that didn't go together at all, she looked a little dorky, but as time went by, she began to look like Audrey Hepburn. Oh, and she liked to draw horses. Something really different about her. I liked her, I liked her alot. I would show her how to do the American dances and she would exoticize me. I liked her, I liked her alot. The Aida Song Aida, Aida, Aida, Aida is the kind of girl who don't have any curls but she's got blue eyes and there's a surprise under there, some kind of thing is going on in her mind. I think I'll find out a whole lot of things from her and you know she's got a cousin named Joyce Witzer. W-I-T-Z-E-R hers was V-I-D-Z-E-R, they changed it at Ellis Island. Oh! Aida, Aida, Aida, Aida, Aida. Aid Vidzer loves Gary Spitzer! Aida, Aida, Aida, Aida Vidzer, Aida, Aida. Aida's House And I remember the first time I went to Aida's ground floor apartment at 611 Euclid Avenue. The kitchen smelled like sardines. Her family ate sardines and green peas and eggs a lot. Her mother Bessie was sitting at the table. She had bright red hair and rosy, rosy cheeks and a wide jaw and no front teeth. No front teeth at all. And there were two glasses on the table. One was filled with hot tea. Her teeth were soaking in the other one. And there were books. Rosicrucian literature and the National Enquirer too . I thought she was strange! Aida went to the bathroom and she screamed when she saw a cockroach and I never understood why Aida screamed when she saw cockroaches cause didn't she grow up in Brazil and weren't there lots of giant flying bugs there? Anyway whenever Aida screamed Bessie would yell "The Devil is in you! The Devil is in you!" Oh yeah, I think she really believed it. The living room was her parent's bedroom too and it was filled with a big bed, a dresser with a mirror on it, a television set with a remote control. A remote control and a bed in the living room? Jacob her father worked in Peru for seven months out of every year but Bessie saved newspapers for him and they were stacked almost to the ceiling and in seven languages . Jacob read in seven languages . Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and English. And when he was home he'd lie on the bed. He wore a white tee shirt, ribbed with little thin straps and he had lots of little black curly hairs on his chest. He'd lie, with his real leg on the bed, but his plastic leg was always standing by itself at the side of the bed. It had a leather strap on it. Aida shared a room with her little brother Fivalla. Fivalla's head was kind of flat on top and he had a pointed chin white skin and freckles. If Jacob would catch him without it WATCHOUT! Anyway, they slept in the back room .There were two beds on metal frames in an L shaped configuration, a metal locker for clothes and a dresser in front of a window with a curtain covering it that was -- I-don't-know-how-it-got-that-way -- gray. Sometimes I would sleep over with Aida with in her bed and Johnny Lee would sleep over with Fivalla in his bed. Fivalla was Bessie's little angel, but little did she know that he and Johnny Lee had a little business ripping off coins from all the pay phone booths in the neighborhood. Just because Johnny Lee's father works in a very clean place, the Chinese Laundry, doesn't mean that Johnny Lee's a clean boy. But even when Fivalla went out robbing he wore his Yarmulka. Electric Menorrah We had a little electric menorrah. I'd screw the bulbs in to light the candles up. But my parents always sat in the back room, smoking cigarettes and eating pork chops! The Jewish People The Jewish people in the projects looked so tiny there inside all the big buildings they had. Ah! They used to sneak outta there to go to synagogue on the High Holy Holidays! And it was such an inspirational song the Cantor was singing. Ah! I wanted to go downstairs with the men with the nice silk shawls they had, with the fringes. But we had to sit upstairs, we had to sit upstairs! You know the projects, where it is now, there used to be a big, beautiful synagogue, with marble! I thought stone was forever. Maria Finchenko/Highland Park Maria Finchenko! Maria Finchenko! Maria Finchenko! Maria Finchenko! Maria Finchenko! Maria Finchenko lived by Highland Park with her Russian father Wasily and his mother Nunu, who she shared a room with. Nunu was over seventy years old and didn't speak a word of English . She was always stirring a big pot of borscht at the stove. The bedroom they shared had little water colors that Maria had painted tastefully placed on the walls and light was always streaming in through the windows. I'd go over there, wearing my long silky dress and Maria would play Russian music on the phonograph and I'd dance over the ottomans while Maria sketched . Her mother who was Austrian didn't live with them but she'd visit Maria on weekends and they'd take walks in the park and talk about clouds. Imagine talking about clouds with your mother? Her father seemed a bit grumpy. He was always fixing the radios, T.V. sets and other appliances that surrounded his cot in the living room. He didn't to seem to like me very much. He thought that I was a bad influence on Maria -- that I was trying to de-Russianize her. Maria's House/The Troika We sit at the table. We eat caviar. We listen to Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff. I love the way you people have got things set up in here. You seem so refined. You know, it wasn't me who told Maria to paint all the wood in the house red, white, blue and yellow. I love real wood. We only had thin wood panels in our house that actually my father never even hammered up on the wall properly, not very attractive. And I've read Dostoevsky and I even learned a couple of Russian words. Da. Nyet. And I know how to do a little Russian dance. It was incredible! They served real vegetables, not the olive green kind we used to get in cans. And they were a whole lot different than the other Russian people I knew who were Jewish, there was so much quiet in the place. And I'm really glad I learned how to do the Troika in the sixth grade. This way I had a little something to show them. Confession Booth And I remember going to St. Fortunata's Church! I sat down in a pew and wondered if anybody knew I was Jewish. I wanted to go into those little confession booths they had. They looked so romantic with all the dark wood and the red velvet. Two booths, Father Spina was in the one on the right and Father Heart was in the one on the left, and they wore gowns. But I had to just sit there and I had a lot to confess, and there were no psychiatrists or anything at that time. You know Frank Torretto was really cute but he hated Jews and my father had blonde hair and blue eyes and worked with his arms. One time I told Frank that my father was Irish, and he believed me too, for a while. "Hey Shell ! So your old man's Irish huh? You wanna go to a movie or something?" Slap The Shit If I wanna dance with you! If I wanna daaaance with you! I' ll hold you in my arms. I' ll hold you real tight! We're gonna spin the bottle. We're gonna kiss! We're goin' ta Ron's house. We're gonna close the doors so that no one'll find us 'cause our parents would slap the shit out of us if they found us. Grandma Gertie My grandmother Gertie died when she was thirty plus twenty two, that makes fifty two. She had two dresses, one purple paisley and one green paisley one. And she held card games in her house for a living. They said she was crude. They said she was the most immaculate one too. And she cooked fish for us on Fridays. And I loved her. The New House Aunt Clara owned a plastic flower company and she decided to loan our family some money so that we could buy a house. At first we looked at houses on Long Island, one family houses with attics and flowered wallpaper and big willow trees out front. But Aunt Clara decided it would be a whole lot better if we bought a two family house, so that we could bring in a little extra income! Well we looked all around and we finally found one. It had a basement, and a backyard and upstairs neighbors. Ceil Schnipper with her stiff red beehive and her high, high heels. She looked like seventeen but she was really fifty seven. It was a lovely day when we moved to the house on the corner. And it was only a block and a half away from where we lived before at 625 Hemlock Street. 625 Hemlock Street When we bought the house the backyard was filled with trees. It looked like a jungle but Dad said they were just weeds so he ripped them all out and laid down slabs of marble that he had found at a building site. Our dogs King and Clancy and Gypsy used to go back there by the one lilac bush that still remained. Uncle Benny took dad in as a partner in his salvage business. They'd buy up old buildings and tear out all the plumbing, clean it up and sell it in their used plumbing store. Dad brought a lot of things home with him. Old books and records, pieces of stained glass, water-soaked boxes of Christmas lights that he thought we'd fix and sell. One time he brought home enough bricks to cover the walls in the basement, and to build a curved brick bar and oversized brick flower boxes that we filled with sand and all the plastic flowers that Aunt Clara had given us. The Misty Lingerie Company. Mom got a job there, working as a switchboard operator. She'd come home really tired at night and she'd lie in her bed with her card tray over her lap. She played solitaire and read Henry Miller novels. Her big bottle of Pepsi Cola, her cigarettes and her potato chips were always on the night stand. I'd serve her lamb chops. She liked them really well done. She especially appreciated the meat around the bone. And we'd talk about what happened to each of us that day and she'd tell me when somebody complimented her on her beautiful telephone voice or told her how articulate she was. And she never did finish High School. Neither did dad. Neither did I. On my sixteenth birthday, my parents gave me a large chunk of the basement to have as my own apartment. I'd invite my friends over for dancing sessions. Sometimes I would go and hangout in the storage room on piles of old fabric and old furs and old clothes. Once when I was in there I found a suitcase. Inside, there was a photograph of dad, with his arm around some red-haired woman and a little boy that I'd never seen before and a copy of Last Exit To Brooklyn. Dipped I remember the way we used to dance in the basement to Johnny Mathis. I was being dipped. "Warm, you're lips against my lips, as warm as fingertips, I've never felt so warm". Vinnie Russo Hey whore! You bring those creepy friends of yours around here and I'll shove it up all of your asses! You got Vinnie Russo, you got the Crescent Gang, man they're really hip! And if you're black and you walk down their street they're gonna fuckin' kick your ass, they're gonna fuckin' kill ya! They thought I was pretty weird too, yeah! Sliced Open I was scared, coming home on the train late at night. I was, I was, I was, I was so scared, just like I am nowadays. I thought I was supposed to be at a safe age. But no such luck. The same kind of things are running through my head now that was running through it then! Oh come and visit me and I promise you won't get your face sliced open like the last guy that came. He told me he was from a group in Ohio called The Music Explosion and I believed him because the only thing I knew about Ohio was that there were some bubble-gum groups out there. But then he came and they ripped his face right open. I promise, it wont happen to you! Franklin K. Lane/I Worked My Ass Off Franklin K. Lane, the high school surrounded by a cemetery. Half of it lies in East New York the other half in Ozone Park, Queens but it was officially a Brooklyn school. I'd gone to school in Manhattan for a year. A school that had only five hundred students, but I decided that I wanted to be a little closer to home. Franklin K. Lane. There were 5,000 kids at that school. I was on the late shift and I was with a lot of kids they were busing in from other parts of Brooklyn. I was separated from the kids I'd known at Junior High before. When I first came around I was wearing my fancy city clothes. My shoe laces matched the bows on my hats. And I wore berets and the black girls in my class would always say, "Hey Bonnie, where's Clyde"? Pretty soon I stopped wearing my Twiggy-like attire and put on bluejeans. It was the time of the Viet Nam War and a lot of teachers taught there so that they didn't have to go. Mr. Tannenbaum was an English teacher and a drummer too and he used to invite me down to his class to sing protest songs. And we were the first school to fly the African flag in the classroom. I tried to join the Afro-American club but no no! No no! "You're white, you're white, you're white, you're white"! One time hundreds of boys from Boys High came down from the elevated trains with broken bottles in their hands . They was rioting, rioting, rioting. Ira Schwartz wore a black beret and he looked like Che Guevara except he had blonde kinky hair, he wore military boots, he lived in Cypress Hills Projects, he turned me on to Marx and Engels. We started going up to S.D.S. meetings up at Columbia University. The kids in the high ceilinged apartment where the meetings took place looked like us but they were different. Bourgeois! Bourgeois! Bourgeois! One night the meeting ended a little later than usual. I asked Ira Schwartz to accompany me home. We took the "A" train to the last stop in Brooklyn. When we got to my house. I invited him in. Before I knew it he had unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock. Not very political. I turned on the light. Cockroaches started crawling out of the dining room table . Dad worked in places that had lots of cockroaches but he never took responsibility. He'd always yell at mom. Dad, he was gone a lot now, he was drinking a lot now, Mom was home alone now. Dad the same guy who always brought his black friends home with him even when guys on the block would say, "you don't bring that nigger around here." Dad would say, "you don't mess with me I'll bring home whoever I like." Dad. He was singing a different song now. Dad. The same guy who thought Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the best president we ever had. "Those people on welfare, they should work, they should get a job, I worked my ass off and I still came home and danced with you." Dad. The same guy who sang with me and danced to Johnny Mathis. "I had to fight 'em off with pipes, those lazy pigs." Dad. The same guy who built solar systems with me on the bottom of a lazy Susan turned, turned. "I want respect, I worked and I want, I earned respect, I deserve respect. Respect! Respect!" Dad. The same guy who took us for sleigh rides on refrigerator doors, found out that I was against the war. 'What are you? A Communist? Communist? Communist? Lazy Communist!" Don't, don't, don't. "Those people, those lazy Communists. We gotta bomb, we gotta bomb, we gotta bomb Viet Nam! We gotta bomb, we gotta bomb Viet Nam!" Hush My Darling "Hush my darling I want to be with you, I really want to be." Marsha Calabro Living by the elevated trains. Marsha Calabro's window looked right out onto the tracks. She could practically touch the trains as they went by. Marsha Calabro. The first time I saw her was in the high school auditorium at Franklin K. Lane High School. She was standing on a ladder with one thick leg extended really high. She was dancing to Bach. And when Maawsha spoke English she tawked like thiss, but when she spoke Spanish or French 'er voice, 'er 'ole body, every-sing was to-tal-ly different. Her parents were always screaming "Mawsha! " But they had to speak really loud. They lived by the elevated trains. They owned a building that had six apartments in it. They were always collecting things, and when one of the families moved out of an apartment they'd fill it up with objects so it couldn't be rented out anymore. Marsha had her own apartment on the second floor and she'd sit in the window and rub rosemary oil on her hair and wrap a big turban around it. Watching the trains go by and listening to the music they made. It was music to her because she loved to love things. Sitting in the window, playing her guitar and she sang like Joan Baez. And she read Rimbaud and she read Soul On Ice and she read Krishnamurti and she would pick up a rock or anything and find the best light on it. And when she moved out with the Medina brothers, Eduardo and Jose the basketball stars at Franklin K. Lane High School, her place became filled up with objects too, so she couldn't move back in again. But then she moved to Spain. She became a flamenco dancer and the mistress of a Spanish architect -- moved in with his wife to learn the ways of another kind. She wasn't blind. She saw just what she wanted to see. Then she moved home and became a Jew for Jesus, even though her name was Calabro, half Roman Catholic. She searched to find something that she could believe in. Something of truth she could believe in. Something she could really believe in. And she taught me a lot. We'd walk under the tracks and talk about being women. Her eyes did glow. Now she's living in Canada. She became a Hassidic Jew and she's married to her second rabbi husband. I went to the first wedding. I talk to her sometimes and I find that her mind is still going in the same direction because she still loves, she still loves, she still loves. Marsha Calabro. Outro East New York. I don't live there anymore but I went back recently and I saw a lot of abandoned buildings. There were churches with hand painted signs on almost every other one. I went past the building where I lived until I was four years old. Some beautiful little kids were playing out front with sticks. The building was all boarded up. And when I told the little kids that I used to live there they asked, "Yeah! Why'd you move out"? "Hmmm", I said, "What's going on here now? Why is the building all boarded up?". "They was dealing alotta drugs here so they closed it up". Down the road was the synagogue where I used to go. It's now a Baptist Church and the pastor woman talked to me about repainting and fixing the chandeliers, keeping it basically the same. They had a little day-care center in the basement. 544 Hemlock Street. Whole different kind of music playing in the hallways now. Real Spanish music, not the kind we used to listen to on Reader's Digest Collection of Music From the World. Down the street at 625 Hemlock Street some kids were sitting on the stoop. I asked one girl questions about the basement and she looked at me like I was really weird. She told me she wanted to be an actress. No white people living there anymore. There used to be swamps at the end of East New York, but now there are all these big high rise buildings. Went to Franklin K, Lane too but now it's a school officially in Queens and I found out that it's the alma matter of John Gotti. Went to Marsha Calabro's house and her family is still living there by the elevated trains but all the families they'd rented to moved out and they filled up all the apartments with their stuff. When I told Mrs. Calabro that I was doing a piece about the neighborhood and started telling her some of the things that I remembered she said to me, "How do you remember all these things? How do you remember?" |