dear friends, i thought i might use Friday to revive some of the stories i wrote in prose, before embarking on this poetic journey of mine.
i wrote these to to be read concurrently, each story informs the next, and the events seem unrelated until the end. it’s how it unfolded, as i lived it back in the 60′s and 70′s in Bushwick, Brooklyn. two of these are very early reposts, the last story was never posted and is quite long so it will be posted in two or three parts.
please don’t feel compelled to read these on your busy Friday morning, feel free to if you want to read them at all to take them into the weekend. thank you and i hope you enjoy them.
if you need to catch up….
I Was a Poor, Pimpled, Uncool Sulker.
The Parking Space
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Susan Walked a Monkey
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Like clockwork the old crabby women were out on the sidewalks at 7am, scrubbing the sidewalks, Tony woke up the entire neighborhood starting up his Chevelle at 7:15, and precisely at three o’clock each afternoonn another daily ritual occured.
At 3pm everything stood still, stopped all motion on the streets and sidewalks. Stickball games halted in mid swing, kids forgot who was ‘it’ in tag, mothers didn’t hear babies crying because that girl, that girl was slowly gliding over the bluestone slabs of the sidewalk again, holding as she did every day, a thin leather leash and teathered to that leash was a little, bitty brown monkey.
Nobody moved, everyone went hush.
This mouth agape, daily diversion from our noisy, litter strewn existence happened seven days a week, you could set your watch to it. For us, it was way better than any Mutual of Omaha special on t.v., heck, we had our own, personal National Geographic reality show, right on our street, in real time, every single day. This was Technicolor, before any of us could afford Technicolor, this was appointment t.v. before the term even existed.
It was the highlight of the day for so many people and so many people had so many opinions, that ‘the girl with the monkey’ had become a flashpoint, a neighborhood controversy. People divided into ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps and argued daily for hours, about Susan and her monkey.
I know it certainly marked my day complete when I saw Susan and her little, bitty monkey walk by, I certainly had no objections whatsoever. Most of the manboy salivators slobbered sexual innuendo and crude one liners, I heard their whispers but I had other designs.
Susan was the most beautiful human that two other humans could possibly conceive but despite that indisputable truth, at thirteen, her beauty had far less appeal to me than petting that monkey. I wasn’t in the position to make many promises in those emotionally unstable days, but I swore to myself, I would somehow, someday, pet that little monkey’s head.
I eventually got my wish a few years later.
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Change came stubbornly to my neighborhood. Strangers were noticed and kept at arms length, not easily accepted and so it went with me as I spent those weeks on my stoop, alone. The first tentative introduction to join in a game of stickball, came very soon after my mom had taped our name in blue BIC ink, above our mail slot. Our last name ended in a vowel and that vowel was my ticket of acceptance, the stamp of approval with the 20 or so kids my age who hung out on my block.
Stickball was played in the street, on the sticky asphalt that got so hot, your sneakers would suddenly stop short in melting gum wads as you ran the bases, your fingers would stick together as you frantically crawled under cars to chase ground balls. Home base was a sewer cap, second base the next one 30 feet away, first and second base were mirrors of parked cars, which was never appreciated by the owners of said cars. It took me a few games to get the hang of things but eventually my athletic experience and instincts kicked in, I happened to be the star pitcher and hitter on my Little League team, back in Long Island.
A perfectly placed vowel and a knack for stickball and I was in.
And that’s just how it was.
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It’s just how it was and that’s how people in this poor, working class neighborhood wanted things to stay but this was 1968, upheaval was sweeping the entire country, change was coming whether people wanted it or not. Susan and her monkey was the personification of that change, because Susan was a hippy.
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And at 15, so was I. Even though I was born a little late to ride the initial wave of peace, love and understanding, I was all in and committed. My uniform consisted of 1 pair of tattered and patched bellbottom jeans, impossibly frayed at the hem, an historically faded denim shirt, beat up Frye boots and a peace sign on a leather rope around my neck and hair that reached the middle of my back, standard hippy uniform for a poor kid on Welfare who couldn’t afford anything else.
Now Susan’s hippy was something altogether different. For some reason, she could walk the same route, walk for miles everyday, yet the hem of her exaggerated bellbottoms were always perfect, not a single fray to be seen. She wore a different Indian style, long sleeved, clean white, cotton blouse everyday, despite the heat and each one had beautifully embroidered, colored stitching, opened low to reveal a shining, silver peace sign hung around her neck. She always carried a small brown, suede leather pouch, colored beads attached to the flowing tassles that shimmied as she walked and a thin leather headband that perfectly corralled her hair, parted in the middle.
Her hair was almost a miracle and no one in our neighborhood of dark brown and black hair, had ever seen anything quite like it. To simply call it blond would be to shortchange the truth, her hair was almost white. It’s length reached the top of her low hung, hip hugger jeans and when the afternoon sun, which was always behind her as she walked, would attach it’s rays to the back and forth motion, it looked illuminated. The reflection almost hurt your eyes and even as she started to disappear from view, down the long, straight blocks, you could still see her hair, gently swish back and forth as she walked.
Susan’s face was a very pale white and it never tanned, it could be 95 sweltering degrees and humid but there was never a bead of sweat to be seen. Wide cheekbones, wide mouth, slightly parted, unlipsticked lips and grey eyes behind dark aviater sunglasses, resting on a narrow nose, she was an almost, Nordic princess who had an air of royalty while she walked through the crowds as they galked. Susan was utterly unfazed by the attention, her expression never changed and I never saw her once utter a word or look anyone in the eye.
Susan was otherwordly. She was untouchable, unnattainable and way out of anyone’s league.
Even the hormone choked, macho manboys in our gang knew it and it pissed them off. They ridiculed her clothes but it wasn’t just her clothes, it was how she wore them. Susan would tie her Indian shirts in a knot just at her ribs and her hip hugger pants rode low on her torso, so there was lots of pale white skin including her bellybutton, showing between the shirt and the top of her pants.
None of the girls in our neighborhood dressed like Susan, no one had ever seen a girl dress like that, except me.
who could know then 