Life Lessons in Bensonhurst

freezer-fresh (ding) vs mr. softee, spal-deen vs pensie pinkie...

When I was 8, my family moved to 80th St. in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

I wrote a poem about my new neighborhood - ‘Bensonhurst, it’s not the best, it’s not the worst’. A more apt description of the neighborhood has never been written.

The year was 1961, and I was entering 4th grade. I’d spent my first 3 years in parochial school, St. Rose of Lima, in the Parkville section of Brooklyn. We were taught by what they called ‘lay’ teachers, though Mrs. Scharf and Mrs. Haggerty didn’t look like they’d ever been. However, Mrs. Laurie, my 3rd grade teach, well…

I had a crush on her. She was young, friendly, and sometimes I’d walk to school with her if she passed my house on Parkville Avenue. It went awry, however, when I got the most ‘stars’ in a class contest, but never received my prize. And when I asked for it after a few weeks, she got mad at me for bugging her. Ever since then I’ve never liked to ask for anything. It hurts less to do without.

But a new school and a new start awaited at P.S. 186, my first public school experience.

When I signed up for school, the registrar informed my parents that my records from St. Rose hadn’t arrived yet, and so they’d have to assign me to the ‘average’ class, called 4-3 (classes were numbered from 1 to 5, 5 being the ‘dumb’ kids). All my school life I’d been at the top of my class, second only to James Angelico, who lived up to his name, and probably always got the prizes due him. So now I would be in the average group, at least until my records arrived from some slow-moving nun.

In a way, it was a relief. I was so pressured those first few years, due to my parents’ expectation of excellence from me. I knew I was smart, but I was also increasingly distracted, and I wasn’t really happy being the second best student in the class and having nothing to show for it, thanks to Mrs. you-know-who.

So I settled in with my group of underachievers, and easily rose to the top of the class, though we barely learned a thing I didn’t already know. Mrs. Leiter was a sweet old lady (probably 50!), and it was a very low pressure environment. I even made a few, average-type friends in the class.

A few months later I got the word. My records had arrived, and I was to report to class 4-1 after the Christmas break. I was informed 4-1 was for IGC students (that’s ‘intellectually gifted something that starts with a ‘c’ ’). I knew no one in the room as I was introduced to the class by Mrs. Sherman, a nice enough but somewhat dull middle aged woman.

Of course, everyone else in the room had been IGCs for 3 and a half years, and the cliques were pretty solid by then. I was shy, and I was now only an average student in the class. They’d already studied French for a year and a half. I never caught up. Quel dommage! (where have you gone, quel dommage?)

And so, as a not-so-smart IGC kid with no school friends, it was a good thing I had a bunch of friends on 80th Street. Every day, especially in the summer, there was some kind of game being played, right in the middle of the street. We’d simply yell ‘car!’, and all play would pause until it passed. In the winter we’d play football. We’d draw lines on the asphalt to represent yardlines, and often the sewers (manhole covers) were the end zones. The guys would mark the line of scrimmage by ‘clamming’ (or orally expectorating) where the previous play had ended. My father once called it ‘the line of spittage’. In the summer, we played punchball, with the sewers as home plate and second base, and a drawn chalk square for 1st and 3rd. Sometimes a car would be parked right over first base. In that case, the car became first base.

it was a time of tough decisions

We also had some made up games, like ‘triangle’, which was essentially slapball, with only 3 bases, played curb-to-curb. 2 against 2 usually. I was a good underhand pitcher, because we had to bounce the ball on the way to the plate, and i knew how to spin a Spal-deen (it said Spalding on the little pink ball, but everyone called it a Spal-deen) so that it’d curve away from the batter (slapper?) after it hit the ground. Of course, we also played stoop ball, which was a popular city game. I’ll spare you the rules of that one, though suffice to say a stoop and a ball were involved.

80th Street was right on the line between the Italian neighborhood, right around New Utrecht High School (the one at the beginning of ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’), and the Jewish neighborhood around Bay Parkway, where Sandy Koufax used to play basketball at the Jewish Community House (the JCH). My block was split right down the middle…I lived on the Italian side, although we also had other Catholics, some Irish or Greek, maybe even a Protestant or two. Then, after Arthur Madrazzo’s house (the only Hispanic kid I ever knew until High School), the rest of the block was entirely Jewish. We all got along amazingly well. There was none of that name-calling one associates with ‘mixed’ neighborhoods, although one kid we knew from that side of the block was usually referred to as ‘Cliffie the Jew’. It was said with love, of course. Just not to his face.

There were so many diverse characters on 80th St. Not diverse as we think of the word today, but colorful personalities. There were the tough kids, like my best friend Johnny Del Balso, whose favorite game was playing ‘The Jets’ from West Side Story, dancing down 80th St. singing ‘when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way…’. I don’t need to tell you how Johnny turned out.

There weren’t many girls on my block. The only two I recall were Barbara, who lived across the street from me. She was in class 4-2, so I knew I was smarter than her. And there was Marie, who always seemed a bit naughty, though I never really found out. Hey, I was a kid!

There was one girl who’d come around sometimes, wanting to play ball with us (not that kind of ‘playing ball’). She lived a few blocks away. Her name was Jo Ann, and she was larger than any of us boys. She also seemed a little crazy. We called her Jo Animal. We were sweet kids.

I was an ok athlete, until I had a growth spurt around 11, at which time I became a dominant Little League pitcher and a pretty good basketball player in the Bay Ridge Church League. Until everyone caught up.

However, I was becoming a lousy student. Being average in a smart class wasn’t as much fun as being smart in an average class. Plus, on my list of ‘faults’, much like Ralph Kramden’s, was ‘can’t speak French’, even though I could speak more French than Barbara in 4-2.

I even played hooky for the first time, in 6th grade. By 8th grade, my whole life became hooky. (In later years, my songs became hooky, and I started a band called The Truants).

I was bored. I was a mediocre student, mostly because I wasn’t too interested in what they were teaching. I started my own ‘course’ of study, a mix of ‘street wisdom’, ‘reading non-fiction non-textbooks’ and ‘watching history programs’. None of those counted toward my official grades, which had slipped into the 70s and 80s.

I realize, looking back, that this was the beginning of my lifelong questioning of norms (I’m sure Norm had questions about me as well). Why should I be like everyone else? The smart kids didn’t like me, I wasn’t good enough at sports, I didn’t sing well (although I enjoyed music)…I failed my audition for the glee club. Around my house, jazz and classical was what was played most on the Zenith Hi-Fi, and until I was 10, I never listened to teenage pop music. In fact, I started listening to WABC in January, 1964, not knowing that a new band from England would change my trajectory a few weeks later.

One image of 80th St. lingers with me to this day. I was out in front of my house on a gray, chilly November day. It was around 6 o’clock, and my father usually got home around then. We’d been let out of class early that day, for reasons that only became clear when I got home. The President had been assassinated. I didn’t have much perspective on what it all meant, until I saw my dad walking toward me from the subway station.

I’d never seen him looking quite like that. Sad, but also exhausted, as if all his spirit had just flown out of him, and he was a shell. He walked slowly, not with the brisk, Marine-like pace he usually had. He seemed slumped over a bit. I knew what was wrong, but I didn’t know why he felt so badly.

In the following months, he lost his job at Allied Chemical, and went through what was explained to me as a ‘nervous breakdown’. He couldn’t work, lost a bunch of weight, and seemed lifeless. I remember once going to a movie with my parents around this time. My dad couldn’t sit through it. We had to leave in the middle.

He eventually recovered enough to go back to work, although he still had anxiety attacks on the subway. He began to reject the values he’d been taught by his parents, and began questioning some of the same things I was.

I became myself on 80th St. I listened to the exciting music that was happening in those years. I was no longer held to, what for me were impossible standards as a student. I was given more freedom to make my own decisions, which is a whole ‘nother story.

By the time we moved away from 80th St., in 1965, I was a different kid. The world was different, too. It was almost as if a lot of people figured out a secret at the same time. The Great Society wasn’t so great. The straight and narrow was crooked and claustrophobic. Things had to change. We had to change. 80th St. had to change. By the summer of ‘65, there were no more punchball games in the middle of the street, no stoop ball or triangle, no one yelling ‘car!’. And there were never any games on the street, ever again.