Cardboard Ocean Page 3

  Getting There

  My mother told me the first game I learned to play was “fall down drunk like daddy.” I don’t remember that. I just remember my mother hiding my father’s shoes and locking him in the back room and him climbing out the bedroom window and walking down the street in his socks and shaking his fist back at my mother.

  It was what I thought was a typical family.

  Sometimes when he was supposed to be babysitting me while my mother went to work, he would take me to the bar at the corner. That was on Ovington Avenue in Brooklyn. He would put me up on a bar stool at the end of the bar and get me a Coke and I would draw circles in the water on the dark wooden bar.

  All I remember hearing of the men was “I killed a lot.”

  “Yeah, well, I killed a lot, too. Almost got killed myself, too.”

  I had seen one picture of my father with a helmet and a pistol and a canteen on an island. He said all the enemy were gone by the time he got there.

  The only other conversation I remember was the men talking about the boy who was killed by a car around the corner. It was one of those cars from the late 1940s or maybe just the early 1950s that had a rocket ship bullet-like projection in the front to make it look fast and powerful, or something like that. To be honest, I never thought of what it was supposed to be.

  But the men said that the bullet had gone right through the kid’s head. “Killed him dead. Smashed him right through the brain.”

  I kept drawing circles in the water on the bar and ate another peanut and wondered what it was like to have a big bullet go through your head. It was one of those questions of childhood.

  One night my mother woke me up while it was still dark.

  “Shhhhh . . . ”

  I was still in my pajamas. She had a suitcase and my coat. We quietly walked down the hallway and out the front door.

  That’s when we got on the train. It was the longest train ride I had ever taken. We went from one side of Brooklyn to the middle of Queens where the subway went above ground and became the elevated train, the El, and when we got off the El the sun was up.

  We walked down 125th Street from Jamaica Avenue toward the railroad yards. My cousin, who I did not remember ever seeing before although I was told he visited at least once, was sweeping the sidewalk.

  I had never seen anyone sweeping outside before.

  “Why are you sweeping?” I asked.

  He looked friendly. “Because my mother told me to, because today was special because you are coming.”

  We would live there while my mother found another apartment. What my aunt did not like about us coming was that it put her son out of his room. We moved into it. What my cousin liked about us coming was that we put him out of his room. He moved out into the hallway at the top of the stairs, outside his parent’s apartment. He was about twelve years old and living on his own, even if it was just a few steps to their front door. He was the happiest kid I have ever known. We lived there for more than a year. The best year ever for him.

  He walked with me on the first day to my new school, P.S. 54, in which Miss Flag was the principal and Miss Johnson was teaching.

  The El passed by half a block from the school and made so much noise that education came only between trains.

  “Children, today we will learn that Columbus . . . ”

  But the train was coming and it took five seconds to go from an approaching rumble to a total drown-out of words.

  My cousin Dick, my mother and me, after we left Brooklyn and went to live with him and his parents in Queens. He was very tall, he still is. I always looked up to him.

  Rumble. Drown out. Rumble. Fade away.

  Until I left for basic training in the Air Force, every conversation, every radio and television program was drowned out every few minutes by the trains. It was worse during rush hour. But even at night on the radio we never knew whether Superman saved the earth or not because just as he was going to stop it from spinning and turn back time to undo the evil that was going to happen, the train went by. We could only guess he saved the world because the next thing we heard was “Be with us next week for the next exciting adventure of Superman.”

  “ . . . and that is why we have an America now,” said the teacher.

  But we didn’t know why. We could only see her mouth moving while the train went by.

  One day we went on a field trip. The teacher told us we did not need our coats. We followed her out of the classroom and then downstairs to the basement and then through a big metal door that we had never been through before. This was very exciting.

  It was warm in the sub-basement and there were pipes and boilers. We went down metal steps and I held on to the banister even though I thought only girls did that, but it was a long way down.

  At the bottom the janitor told us to make a circle around the furnace. It was hot even back where we were standing.

  He opened the front grating and we saw a giant circle of fire.

  “Those are the blue flames that keep us warm,” he said.

  Then he shut the grating and we went back to our classroom and I forgot all about it.

  Fifty years later my wife and I were babysitting our granddaughter, Ruby, who was four, and we were sweeping outside. I should have known that was special because any time with her was special. She was holding onto the broom and helping me.

  My wife opened the door and said the house was cold, do something. Wives say things like that.

  I took Ruby down to the basement and opened the grating on the front of the furnace. It had gone out. I lit it and a circle of flames jumped up and Ruby jumped back.

  “Those are the blue flames that keep us warm,” I said to her.

  She looked at me with her beautiful granddaughter eyes and said, “Now can we have some ice cream?”

  But I know that fifty years from now she will be with her grandchild and something like that will happen. They will have some kind of heating, even if it is nuclear flames pretending to be real.

  She will light it and she will say to her grandchild, “Those are the blue flames that keep us warm.” And then she will say, “My grandfather told me that.”

  And I will have a connection with a child I will never know, thanks to a janitor in P.S. 54.

  “But what about swimming in the Mediterranean?” my daughter asked. “Your story is not bad, but you keep promising to tell me how you got to Greece.”

  “We took the train, the El, the Jamaica Avenue El train. The noisy train that blocked the sun from the street. The train we took when we moved to our new home on 132nd Street, just off Jamaica Avenue. There was the ocean.”

  She was getting a bit impatient. You are probably getting the same way, but we are there now.

  When my mother and I moved to a new apartment of our own, we got off the train at 132nd Street. The ocean was around the corner.

  Finally, There

  Our back windows looked out onto the Long Island Rail Road commuter tracks. They were close enough to almost read the headlines on the newspapers except the trains went by so fast the news was all a forgettable blur, like watching television news now.

  At rush hour, the trains in the back passed by every ten minutes. There were four sets of tracks. The El on the corner of the street also passed by every ten minutes.

  “My God,” said an uncle who helped us move in. “How are you ever going to be able to sleep?”

  Then there were the airplanes of Idlewild Airport, which was nearby. They took off over our street. This was long before President Kennedy was killed and they changed the name to JFK.

  “What noise? You get used to it,” said Joey, a kid I met the first morning on the new street.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Mike,” I said.

  “Okay, Mickey, I’ll show you around.”

  For the next twenty years I was Mickey.

  “This is where we go swimming,” he said.

  We had gone around the corner to 131s
t Street, and there was a beautiful sight, a factory that turned out ice cream.

  “We climb up there and jump in,” said Joey.

  We were standing near a fenced-in compound two stories high filled with cardboard boxes.

  “Here, follow me,” he said.

  We climbed up the chain-link fence to the top.

  “We usually get on the roof, then jump in.”

  Joey crawled off the top of the fence onto the flat black tar roof of the factory and I followed and wow, how else could it be described? It was wonderful up here. You could watch the El passing by but now I was looking straight at it instead of straight up. And when I turned around I was looking straight at the commuter train. I was on top of the world.

  “Follow me.”

  He jumped into the boxes and sunk to his chest. I jumped and did the same.

  “Now you dive down and you can swim all day.”

  I followed him and I was pulling my way through the boxes but no way near as fast as Joey.

  “It’s like swimming,” he said, “except I don’t know what swimming is. I never did it.”

  He stopped swimming and I caught up to him. This was amazing, incredible, even neat. We were about halfway down the pile, pushing boxes aside and pulling ourselves forward. The deeper we went, the harder it got and some of the boxes were sticking in my back. I struggled forward and one of them hit me in the face. This was before cardboard was flattened when it was thrown out.

  “Mickey, look at this.”

  “What?”

  Joey had crawled ahead of me and the boxes closed in behind him. All I could see was a bumpy wall of brown.

  “Come here, over here, where I am, you brought us luck.”

  “Where?”

  “Here!!”

  I didn’t know if the voice was coming from below or above me, so I started to pull myself straight through the cardboard. I pushed aside one box when a foot came shooting back and the heel kicked me in the face.

  “Owww!”

  “Sorry, I was coming back to get you.”

  I tried to pull my hand back through the cardboard to wipe the sting off my cheek but I couldn’t move because my arm was wedged between a box and the fence.

  “I’m stuck.”

  “You can’t be stuck. Nobody gets stuck here and besides I gotta show you this.”

  I pulled myself forward and crawled up next to Joey who had his head inside a box.

  “Look at mif. I’s gret.”

  I couldn’t understand him.

  He struggled to get out but couldn’t move back because when he pushed against the box that was by his knees, the box went into my stomach and I yelled.

  He turned his head in the box so he could look out at me.

  “There’s wafers here. Look at how many.”

  He used one hand to pass back to me about a dozen broken chocolate wafers that go on the outsides of ice cream sandwiches.

  “There’s lots in here,” he said as his head went back inside the box.

  I could hear him crunching on them. I took a bite. They were so good. The chocolate filled my mouth and made me want more. I heard later in life that chocolate is the only thing besides crack cocaine that is instantly addictive. I wanted more.

  I shoved a second and third one into my mouth before I swallowed the first. I tried to get some of them down my throat so I could fit more into my mouth. This was better than anything I had ever done in my life, although I had not done very much.

  “Wan’ mor’?” Joey mumbled with his mouth full and his head in the box.

  “Yeah, let me see how much there is,” I said.

  Then came a crashing from above us. It was not like someone jumping into the water because I didn’t know what that sounded like, but it was like cardboard boxes getting crushed and crumpled and then I felt the boxes crushing and crumpling into my back.

  “Joey,” someone yelled. “You got wafers, I know you got wafers.”

  “Tommy,” sputtered Joey while he tried to swallow. “I don’t have any wafers,” Joey shouted.

  “Do so, I could hear you eating.”

  “You didn’t hear me eating, and I wasn’t eating.”

  His mouth was almost cleared out.

  “He heard you,” Joey said to me. “You gotta be quiet when you find wafers. You can hear things far away in the ocean. Here.”

  He shoved a pile of wafers at me and grabbed two handfuls for himself.

  “Follow me.”

  He started pulling through the boxes, going level and then diving. He could not grab the boxes because his hands were full, so he used his arms and feet to move through the boxes. There were more crashes from above.

  “Joey, we’re coming for you.”

  “That’s Jimmy Lee,” said Joey, “and that means Johnny will be there too. Maybe Dorothy. And if she’s here . . . ”

  More crashes. More boxes crunching around us.

  “ . . . the little kids are here, too,” he finished.

  I could not keep up with Joey. He was a fish, okay, maybe a slow-moving fish, but he was moving like a fish and I could barely crawl.

  “Who are you?”

  I turned my head. I was ten feet down under a pile of cardboard boxes and a pretty girl was talking to me. I don’t think a girl had ever talked to me before.

  “Mickey,” I said. I was surprised. I had never called myself that before.

  “You new around here?”

  I couldn’t answer. She had hair, and eyes.

  “Well, are you new? And who beat you up?”

  “No one,” I said because I didn’t want her to think anyone could beat me up.

  “Well, you sure look like it,” she said. “But let’s get Joey, he has wafers.”

  She started swimming away. I said, “I have wafers, too.”

  She crawled backwards. There was commotion around us, above us, to one side of us and below. Boxes were crushing down and the whole world under the cardboard was moving. Then the boxes started moving underneath us.

  “Those are the little kids,” she said, sort of gesturing with her head down below. “They try to get under Joey and wait until he drops some.”

  “Joey said the little kids come with you.” My gosh, I had said something, more than just I have wafers.

  “But I do have wafers,” I said and held out one hand filled with crushed brown pieces.

  “No, those are yours. I want Joey’s. He always gets a lot.”

  She began swimming away.

  “Wanna come?”

  “Yes,” I said very loudly, louder than I planned on saying it. I don’t know why I said it like that, but yes, I want to go with you more than I want chocolate.

  She was off, almost sliding through the pile of brown boxes. She was wiggling and gliding. I tried to follow, but my elbows got in the way.

  She stopped and I pulled myself up closer and saw she was wrestling under the boxes with Joey. I didn’t even know her and I wanted to be the one wrestling with her.

  “Okay,” Joey muffed through his stuffed mouth. “Have them all.” He held out a chocolate covered hand to her.

  “There’s only crumbs,” said the girl. “You didn’t even save me any.”

  “I shared them with the new kid.”

  They saw half my face staring at them from between two boxes.

  “Did you punch him?” the girl asked Joey.

  “No, he just put his face in my foot. I’ll see you at the top.”

  They started climbing and I tried to follow, but no way could I keep up with them. They knew which boxes would hold them and they put their feet on them and climbed almost like on a ladder. I stepped on a box and it collapsed and the edge of it banged into my shin and then the other boxes caved in on top of me.

  “Owww,” I tried to keep it quiet, but the girl looked down. I could just barely see her face. She was more than a full body length ahead of me.

  “Come on, Mickey. Let’s go lay on the beach,” she said when I finall
y got to the top.

  Looking out from the roof of the ice cream factory, my eyes felt relaxed. I never had that feeling before. Always before there was something in front of me, not far away. At most, a building was across the street, but mostly things were just a few steps away. Your eyes got used to seeing close up. But up here you could see forever, almost. And it was so high. If I was at the end of the roof near the El I could throw a ball and bounce it off one of the trains.

  And when the big passenger trains were not racing by, like right this second, you could see over the tracks almost to the end of the world. Those trains were on a hill the same height as the factory, but this hill was endlessly long. It was built so that when the trains came to a road they were already up high and could cross over the cars on a trestle. The train stopped for nothing.

  And down below us on the street were the ice cream trucks. They clogged the road. No other traffic could get through but there was no other traffic, only the white trucks with boxes on the back and pretend chimneys on top of the boxes. They were getting loaded up with small boxes of ice cream pops and sandwiches and blocks of dry ice that were steaming in the air.

  This newer Bungalow Bar truck is a Chevrolet from 1960, when the swimming was long behind us. I have to say that because some old guys will say, “Hey, that’s a 1960 Chevy and he said they were ’53s.” Never get your truck years mixed up.

  And there were the bells. They hung out over the top of the windshields and the drivers would test them and it sounded like Christmas was supposed to sound until a train went by. Then we could see the bells moving, but they were not making any noise.

  The poor drivers I later learned, made their living from the bells. But they had to ring them while they were driving which meant one hand was pulling a cord attached to the bells while their other hand was shifting gears while their other hand was steering.

  The trucks were 1953 Chevy pickups, with a big cooler in the back and on top of the cooler was a peaked shingled roof with a make-believe chimney.

  It looked like a bungalow, and so the company was called Bungalow Bar.

  “What’s a bungalow?” I asked.