They were especially critical of Cedric. "Tell your shoes to have a party and invite your pants down," they'd say, or they'd call him 'Seedric,' which they thought was particularly hilarious. They'd dig their hands into their overcoat pockets, press their feet together, bend their knees and rotate their hips side to side like windshield wipers to show how hard they were laughing.
Cedric just stood, mouth half-open, looking stunned. But his mouth was always half-open; he always looked stunned. We'd noticed that and way the expression on his face never changed, but figured it was because he didn't want to make his mother more nervous about him than she already was. We never mentioned it, but it got on Barry Bogardus's nerves, and anything that bothered Bogardus bothered Kenny Nails.
Barry was fourteen and big and strong and had a spike haircut on top and long hair on the sides slicked back into a 'duck's-ass.' None of us had ever seen a haircut like that before, or teen-aged boys in camel's hair overcoats, pegged gray flannel trousers and black loafers with shiny quarters stuck in the straps either. We thought of them as a major new experience for the neighborhood, because we didn't know the Germans were gassing Jews at Auschwitz or that their submarines were sinking our ships off our coast or that they'd launched their attack on Stalingrad.
Kenny Nails had a tough face, spoke without moving his lips, and always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth movie gangster-style. We weren't afraid of him, but Barry's father was a big bookmaker, Barry was on the football team at Horace Mann and had already beaten up two guys from Columbus Avenue. Everybody was afraid of Barry including me.
One day he and Kenny Nails were watching Cedric pick up marbles and stick them into his side pocket and I saw Bogardus whisper something. Kenny Nails nodded and did his windshield wiper laugh.
Bogardus walked over to where Cedric was sitting on the curb and kicked the toe of his black loafer into Cedric's bulging marble pocket. The whole big bulge erupted forth and marbles went bouncing all across 88th Street.
"Hock scramble!" a kid named Red called and the marble shooters ran over to snatch Cedric's marbles. If nobody called "hock scramble" you were supposed to give them back, but once somebody called it you were allowed to keep any you picked up. It was a rule meant for when kids dropped a few marbles accidentally. Nobody had ever intentionally kicked a kid's pocket before and no previous hock scramble had ever been on anything like that scale.
Bogardus and Kenny Nails shoved their hands into their overcoat pockets, bent their knees and shook their hips to laugh at the kids diving for Cedric's marbles, and at the still blank expression on Cedric's face. That made me hate Barry as much as I hated the Japs and Germans. A guy his size and age wasn't supposed to kick the pocket of a kid Cedric's size. But I was afraid to say anything so I just picked up as many as I could and gave them back to Cedric.
He didn't protest; his blank expression didn't change. From then on, he just kept his pocket zipped. He picked up marbles, held them in his tan woolen glove, looked round for Bogardus, Kenny Nails or any other potential pocket-kicker. If the coast was clear, he unzipped his pocket, put in the marbles and zipped it up again.
It reminded me of what Blue Book had said about kids with cigar boxes turning into bankers. I couldn't see Cedric as a banker, but I could see him as the proprietor of a drug store in a bad neighborhood. If he got held up, he wouldn't protest; the expression on his face wouldn't change. He'd just lock the door, and from that time on, open it only for customers he recognized.
What started me writing was watching things disappear. The flowers on the dining table disappeared fast; the rubber plant on the radiator cover, more slowly. The gaunt woman in the black bonnet and black dress down to her ankles who came every Wednesday, ate one boiled egg, one boiled potato, and washed our laundry on the scrubbing board in the laundry sink next to the kitchen sink disappeared.
My grandmother and my grandfather disappeared. So did one of my aunts. The curly-haired teen-ager who taught me how to throw a spiral and who joined the Army Air Force the day after Pearl Harbor disappeared. My baseball bat, my skates, my baseball cards, my marbles and my cousin who flew the Hump to Burma.
My father disappeared and then my mother. Everything I have ever owned, everyone I have ever known?even my children. The babies turned into toddlers and the toddlers turned into teenagers trying to prove that they didn't need me. Then the teenagers disappeared and turned into adults who truly do not need me and now it's happening even to them.
We try to stop things from disappearing. We keep rings, bracelets, articles of clothing; we preserve old letters written in ink that slowly fades until you can no longer make out the characters. The paper turns yellow, then brown, then it cracks at the folds, and then it crumbles into a powder and the powder disappears. We mount photographs in albums using glue that dries and cracks and the photographs fall out and disappear.
My father made black and white films of my brother and me taking tobacco out of his humidor and eating it, of us dunking for apples at our Halloween party, of me squirting my brother with water from the concrete drinking fountain in Riverside Park, back before the WPA built the concourse to hide the railroad tracks down there. I even remember a little zoo, with sheep and goats and a pony you could ride. Not only are the zoo and the animals gone, but now people try to tell me that they were never there.
When the images on my father's black and white films began to fade, my brother converted them to videotape and after my brother was gone I put the videotapes on the shelf next to my VCR. But the images on the videotapes have begun to fade and soon they too will disappear.
How shall summer's honey breath hold out against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days when rocks impregnable are not so stout, nor gates of steel so strong but time decays? Unless this miracle have might, says Shakespeare, that in black ink my love may still shine bright. Garrison, the main character in Succession tries to use that power to prevent his dead grandfather and dying father from disappearing. He does not succeed, but that is what attracts me to writing about the way things used to be.
I was born in New York City at the beginning of the 1930s and grew up there until I went into the army at the beginning of the 1950s. I will write about the way things used to be there back then; the way we lived, the things we owned, the games we played, the schools, the movies, the stores, the neighbors, the neighborhoods.
That power of black ink, not to stop things from disappearing, but to make them disappear more slowly was what started me writing and it will keep me writing until the day I disappear.
(Originally published at AuthorsDen and reprinted with permission of the author, Herbert Lobsenz).
Herbert Lobsenz has sinced written about articles on various topics from Writing, Politics and Writing. Herbert Lobsenz studied literature at Heights College, NYU, went into the army during the Korean War and, following Robert Jordan of For Whom The Bell Tolls, became an EOD specialist. His second novel, Vangel Griffin (1961), won the Harper Prize and appea. Herbert Lobsenz's top article generates over 1900 views. to your Favourites.