850 Bryant Avenue
I grew up counting bees and straining chunks of sandstone into empty soup cans. I watched cats play with dead mice and then run away up the block to an abandoned house filled with ceramic bowls heaped with flies. My playground was the lot that adjoined our apartment building; it’s where I climbed pretend mountains to explore new countries, where I studied flowers and whatever happened to grow in broken glass–clover, chicory, and dandelions, the weeds of New York City that took root amidst the discarded empty TV boxes that became our playthings. We rolled in them until we became dizzy sick, our sides sore from neighborhood kids kicking outside the box.
“Stop! Stop!” Nobody ever listened, nor did they listen when we played “Knucks,” a game that involved rapping the loser hard with a full deck of cards and ended with bleeding and shredded knuckles.
Hunts Point Avenue or “the Avenue” as we referred to it, had dry good stores filled with overalls and grey wool sweaters. It also had a stationery store that we visited at the beginning of each school year. I loved the store for its pencils and crayons and its notebooks of white composition paper, just a few stores up from the delicatessen where they sold corned beef and pastrami sandwiches lacey with white fat and where some boys stopped me one day to inform me, “You have a pussy in between your legs.” I looked and saw nothing.
Beyond the deli and at the outermost limits of the Avenue was the Garrison Bakery run by an Italian family who sold black and white cookies, five-inch disks with an anise aftertaste. Beyond the bakery was the Bruckner Expressway, a thoroughfare of cars rushing headlong in opposite directions.
First there was the Hunts Point subway station surrounded by a wrought iron grating and flanked on one side by a newsstand where people bought copies of the New York Post or the Daily News and also The New York Times, which was displayed in a smaller stack beneath the two other papers. Then there was a triangular park with wooden benches where men, women, and children watched pigeons eat bread crusts. From here the rest of Southern Boulevard fanned out, home to a toy store and a Chinese restaurant where we ate lunch after going to the movies at Loew’s Cinema Theater where my mother took me to see all the musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Summer raced by in baseball cards, roller skates, hula hoops, hopscotch, marbles, jump ropes, bottle caps, Spalding balls, water guns, yo-yos, pea shooters, and coloring book season. Girls collected and traded charms. My “best one” was a purple swan. There also was rock-throwing where the Longfellow and Bryant Avenue gangs tried to see who’d go crying first to the emergency room of Lincoln Hospital.
“You hurt?”
“No. just bleeding.”
–to be continued