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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
The Irresistible Force
You don't see
kids on roller skates these days, the clamp-on-your- shoes kind of roller skates.
It's roller blades now. They have shoes attached and you've got to wear a helmet
and knee pads, and they cost two hundred hundred dollars a pair. What a terrible
idea!
Good old Union Hardware roller skates! Clamp-on-your-shoes roller skates. Six
or seven kids would get in a line and snap the whip, and the kid on the end
would knock over the baskets at Bertucci's vegetable store. We'd skate through
the winding paths of Prospect Park and scatter the old men who ventured out
for the sun, we'd hoot at the lovers in the grass and put the pigeons to flight.
We'd skate to school -- we'd skate in school if they'd let us, but normally
we'd take them off, strap them together and wear them around our necks all day.
Coming home I'd clomp up the four flights of stairs with my skates on until
I saw my mother bending over the stairwell shaking her fist at me. It felt strange
when you took them off. You almost had to learn to walk again. Weekends were
the best of all, we'd hitch rides on the back of trolley cars and find ourselves
in parts of the city we never saw before. It
was a kind of junior edition of the New York Times "Sophisticated Traveler."
On the whole God went easy on us -- perhaps he had other plans, but really,
I think me and Ernie were so good at it He couldn't lay a finger on us. Eddie
Fox was another story. I wouldn't say Eddie was clumsy, but he was the biggest
kid in school -- big as a teacher. He was so big he wasn't afraid of bumping
into anything or anybody and whatever he bumped into fell over or broke. Eddie
wore out two pairs of roller skates every summer.
Well, there we
were, one late Saturday afternoon the three of us like sucker fish dragging
along the side of the Flatbush Avenue Trolley way out in Canarsie. The area
between the tracks wasn't paved then so you had to hang on to the side of the
car.
Fate played Eddie a cruel trick. Because of his height his head was above the
window sill and he could look inside and see the passengers. Who should be looking
at him straight in the eye -- but his father! Like all of us, Eddie had been
told, "If I ever catch you hitching a ride behind a trolley car I'll kill
you, understand?!" Yes, Eddie was big, but he was nowhere near as big as
his father who worked in a box factory out there in Canarsie. Eddie's face went
white as a sheet -- he turned to us and let go at the same time shouting, "IT'S
THE OLD MAN, HOLY SHIT, IT'S THE OLD MAN!!"
We couldn't see
Eddie's father, we weren't big enough, but we were pretty sure God had caught
up with Eddie after all as we watched him slingshot in a graceful (yet irresistible)
curving trajectory away from the trolley car and into the open door of an Italian
bakery.
It's been more than a few years since that experience and I hope I may be forgiven
if the subsequent sequence of events seem disjointed. I know the trolley car
ground to a halt, perhaps Eddie's father told the motorman to stop. I know me
and Ernie peeled off before it stopped and coasted up to the bakery so we could
see inside. By then Eddie had disappeared through the open door. Eddie's father
got off and from the look in his eye he was definitely going to kill Eddie,
if Eddie wasn't dead already -- I think God might have been more lenient with
him than his father was.
Things were not
ship-shape in the bakery either. From our vantage point, me and Ernie could
see that the Italian pastry counter was in shambles and much of the bread was
on the floor. We stayed long enough to see Eddie with his skates still on leaving
the bakery hobbled by his father's half-nelson, then we slowly and soberly skated
home.
There were repercussions. "Were you out with the Fox kid yesterday?"
.... "Oh no, Ma .... me and Ernie went to the library, see .... here's
the book I took out." As I mentioned before, God was forgiving -- if my
mother had looked at the date she would have seen I borrowed it a week ago.
Well, to a lesser degree God had been kind to Eddie as well -- aside from a
dislocated shoulder, either from his father's half-nelson or his pileup in the
bakery, he seemed to be unscathed. He never snitched, he never asked for reparations
.... the code of silence remained unbroken. We thanked him later as best we
could -- we took him to the movies .... "Ben Hur," starring Ramon
Navarro.
It was the least
we could do.
©Harry Buschman 1996
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