Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Italian Flags on Columbus Day on Lorimer and Conselyea Streets

It's been a gorgeous Indian summer holiday weekend in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, we've been disabled with tendinitis tibialis posterior for the past four days, and from Friday to Sunday we only were able to walk as far as our porch, where we did sit outside and watch the passing scene, pretending it was early June or maybe late August.

Today we had off for Columbus Day, and of course the holiday is controversial, as it should be, given the genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas (having used "Indian summer" in this post and in a book title, we're hoping people aren't offended).

But here, on our block and around the corner -- about as far as we could travel on our poor feet today -- Columbus Day is largely a celebration of all things Italian, as it is right here, home of the Giglio Boys:

So Italian flags and the red, white and green colors were evident, even if there were used to be more of them in this part of Williamsburg back in the day.


We watched the parade on channel 7 and especially enjoyed the rendition of "Al Di La."

If we'd been more mobile, we'd have been at a lower Manhattan location honoring one of many great Italian-Americans: Zuccotti Park, where many people took advantage of the holiday and wonderful weather to join Occupation Wall Street. Including kids off from school.

So Columbus Day can't be all that bad.

Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Grand Opening of Bagelsmith at Metropolitan Avenue and Lorimer Street

We were thrilled to see today's grand opening of Bagelsmith at the southeast corner of Lorimer Street and Metropolitan Avenue, which has been vacant forever.

It's the newest branch of the great Bedford Avenue place. There are entrances both on Metropolitan and Lorimer. If we can remember back to 1997, when we first stayed at our current location, this actually used to be two different stores.

We remember getting the New York Times from a newsstand-type place on Lorimer Street the day our op-ed about New Jersey appeared back then. The corner store was variously over the years different things, we think: a bodega, video store, maybe even a liquor store.

Bagelsmith is a big improvement.

Early Friday Morning in Williamsburg: Breakfast at Metro Community Laundromat

It's early morning in our stretch of Williamsburg. Our next-door neighbors have decorated their stoop with the plants that are its only users; they're pretty and discourage random sitters.

On Lorimer Street, kids in charter school polo shirts are heading out of the subway with their backpacks to begin their day while older people and some parents with littler kids head down to the L train. At San Marco Pizzeria, the espresso is already brewed, the regulars starting to gather out front.

Around the corner on Metropolitan Avenue, the Asian bottle ladies are sorting and gathering their glass.

We're headed to Metro Community Laundromat with our dirty clothes, towels and sheets,

trying to take advantage of the rare sunny break in this week's endless rain.

We've got our New York Times -- the early-bird thieves who were grabbing it from our stoop all winter seem to have lost interest in the news -- and homemade iced tea in a Snapple bottle and a plastic container of multigrain cereal from Trader Joe's with half a cup of skim milk poured on it (yes, we eat the stuff without cooking it) to enjoy after we've put our clothes in the washing machine.

Free reading material -- here, the Williamsburg Courier, Greenpoint Star and Metro -- sits on the counter.

We're alone, except for a few others and the Chinese woman by the booth. Her friendly gray-haired husband, if it is her husband, or maybe brother or no relation at all, isn't around yet.

An almost-empty laundromat

is as peaceful as a church half an hour before services.

Drying is always more fun, we think.

Laundry is our favorite household task, the only one we're good at. Our dad, who didn't learn how to do laundry until he was in his late 70s, after our mom got Alzheimer's, is an expert now. Many men are.

The laundromat that never sleeps provides some great benches outside for the smokers, the readers, and sometimes just passersby in great weather like this morning.

Across the street someone's getting Crest Hardware ready for the day's business.

A lone hipster and somebody's abuela enter with bundles of stuff that will come out cleaner. Later on there are others, including as we fold, this husband and wife doing five loads as they share a cup of coffee and quiet talk in Spanish.

There's no other reaction to a morning like this but feeling grateful to be alive in a time of fabric softeners.

Saturday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Vintage Electric Guitars for Sale on Metropolitan Avenue

On this sunny, fairly mild afternoon, vintage electric guitars -- over forty of them at the start -- were on sale from a booth on Metropolitan Avenue by Lorimer Street.

It was "a one-day event," said the man in charge of the booth, which featured some fine-looking guitars from different decades.

A good number of people were interested. Some were buying.

We heard several of them say they were in bands. Naturally. This is Brooklyn.

It was pleasant to hear the sounds as people tried them out or as the sales guy demonstrated the guitars.

Not everyone nearby was interested.

We were content to stop, look and listen, and then, when the time came, earnestly follow the cotton candy man up Lorimer Street to get home.

Fifty Years Ago in Brooklyn: Park Slope Plane Crash

As lots of media reports have noted for the past week, today was the day, fifty years ago, that two planes collided in midair in New York City and one crashed right into the middle of Park Slope.

We have a clear memory of that day and have written about it in places, on the blog Syntax of Things but mostly in our story, "The Boy Who Fell to Brooklyn," which first appeared in the University of Miami literary magazine Mangrove in 2005 and then as the last story in the collection And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street.

We reprint it here:

THE BOY WHO FELL TO BROOKLYN

In 1931, my grandmother was locked up in the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital for trying to strangle the obstetrician who would deliver me twenty years later.

Grandma Ethel always attributed her temporary insanity to all the blood she lost in the delivery of her only child, my mother. Apparently she tried to choke the doctor with his own necktie.

Jacob Levine didn’t hold a grudge. He knew it was because of her mental illness. She was only nineteen. Dr. Levine remained her doctor after she got well and became my mother’s after she came of age.

He delivered me at Beth-El Hospital in 1951 and four years later he performed my grandmother’s hysterectomy.

Dr. Levine was a thin man, always elegantly dressed. He had white hair and a mustache by the time I knew him. I never saw him without a vest.

When I was nine, my mother got pregnant again. When Mom was in her seventh month, on Friday, December 16, 1960, she fell down the stairs in our house in Flatlands. It was only six well-carpeted steps and she didn’t seem hurt, but still. Dr. Levine told her to come to his office at 50 Plaza Street, just off Grand Army Plaza.

When I got out of my fourth grade class at P.S. 203 for the day, my parents were waiting for me with the car. We were going to make sure Mom and the baby were all right. Freezing rain fell as we drove up Flatbush Avenue.

That morning, two planes had collided over New York Bay. One plane, bound for La Guardia, crashed in a vacant field in Staten Island. The other plane, a DC-8 jet trying to get to Idlewild, crashed into a church on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, just a few blocks from Dr. Levine’s office.

It looked as if the pilot had been trying to land in Prospect Park. If so, he fell about five hundred feet short.

It was the worst disaster in aviation history. One hundred and thirty-four people were killed, including four on the ground in Park Slope. By 4 p.m., the time we got to the area, the worst of the chaos was over.

Dad bought a New York Post at the newsstand at Grand Army Plaza as we walked to Dr. Levine’s office. It was an Extra edition, about the plane crash.

On the front page was a picture of a boy around my age, sitting dazed in a snowbank. His face was so blackened, I couldn’t tell if he was white or Negro.

Stephen was the only survivor from the two planes. A woman picked up the burned boy and drove him the thirteen blocks down Seventh Avenue to Methodist Hospital.

People were in and out of Dr. Levine’s waiting room as we sat there, all talking about the crash, describing the rain of metal and fire. Two women said the little boy’s survival was a miracle and they were going to a special Mass at their church to pray for him.

Park Slope was a decaying neighborhood back then. Storefronts on Seventh Avenue were boarded up, and the only supermarket, an old A & P, was the filthiest grocery store I’d ever been in.

Dr. Levine’s young associate, Dr. Sidney Silverman, examined Mom. She and the baby were going to be just fine, he said. Dr. Silverman told me maybe I’d have a little sister like he did. His sister Beverly was going to be an opera singer.

“Or you could have a little brother,” Dr. Silverman said. “As long as the baby is healthy, it doesn’t matter.”

The boy from the plane died the next morning. He’d been supposed to come from Chicago with the rest of his family for a Christmas visit, but he had a sore throat and so his trip was delayed. His parents and sisters were already in New York.

They said he must have been sitting on a stewardess’s lap in the jump seat, and the door must have opened somehow. That’s how Stephen fell from the sky.

At Methodist Hospital, they found four dimes and five nickels in his pocket and gave them to his parents. As they left the hospital the next morning, after Stephen was gone, his father put the coins in the collection box.

It was the snowiest winter I can remember. The schools were closed several times, including the day of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, which I watched on TV. We stopped having winters like that years ago.

A light snow was falling eight weeks after the crash, the Friday Mom went into labor. She called Dr. Levine’s office and Dr. Silverman took the call. He told her if she could hold out till 8 p.m. before going to the hospital, they wouldn’t charge her for the extra day.

So we sat around my grandparents’ apartment in East Flatbush as darkness fell.

Always nervous, I asked Mom, “Are the pains really bad?”

She nodded and said, “Pretty bad.” But she was smiling.

I was worried because I knew my mother, like me, had an incredibly high pain threshold. (Our dentist, Dr. Hersh, liked us because we never took Novocain, no matter how deep our cavities that needed drilling. “Guts dentistry,” Dr. Hersh called it.)

I was afraid my new sibling was going to pop out then and there in Grandma Ethel’s kitchen, so I made sure that Dad drove Mom over to Beth-El Hospital. That way they’d be just outside in case she had to go in before 8 p.m.

Asleep in the Castro convertible in the living room that night, I dreamed I had a baby sister. But when I woke up, I saw that my grandfather had written on a piece of construction paper with a crayon, “IT’S A BOY!”

As long as it’s healthy, I thought.

After Dr. Levine died, Dr. Silverman moved his office to Kings Highway, closer to the part of Brooklyn where we lived. He remained Mom’s gynecologist for years. Except for the problems with her Dalkon Shield IUD, I never heard Mom complain about Dr. Silverman.

When I was in the MFA program at Brooklyn College, my girlfriend was a patient of Dr. Silverman’s, too.

I accompanied her to his office once when she had a yeast infection. In the waiting room, I introduced myself to Dr. Silverman as Marilyn Grayson’s son, and we shook hands. By that time, his sister, Beverly Sills, was very famous.

My friend Jerry was impressed when I told him about Dr. Silverman being the gynecologist of both my mother and my girlfriend.

When Jerry was in Sheepshead Bay High School, he once began an essay on the topic “My Favorite Place” with the sentence: “My favorite place is the vagina.”

“It’s cosmic about Dr. Silverman,” Jerry told me. “He knows where you came from and he knows where you’re going.”

But I never left Brooklyn.

My grandparents did, but just across Jamaica Bay for a beachfront co-op in Rockaway. Of course they’re dead now, but Grandma Ethel lived long enough to be helped by Prozac.

In the 1970s, my parents moved to Florida, and later, to Arizona. My brothers live out of state, too.

Dr. Sidney Silverman retired to Florida and died there in 1999.

Jerry had apartments near Brooklyn College, on Ocean Parkway, and then in Brooklyn Heights, but eventually he moved to Manhattan. He works a few blocks from ground zero.

He’s got a son now, too. When I see Jesse, I always greet him the same way: “Hey, homeboy.” I’ll keep doing it as long as the kid keeps smiling.

Park Slope has changed a lot, as I’m sure you know. I teach writing workshops in an elementary school not far from Dr. Levine’s old office on Plaza Street, not far from Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place.

The kids reacted in different ways to 9/11. One third-grade girl wrote these depressing stories about Eggy, a giant egg guy to whom terrible things kept happening. But by the end of the school year, there was a change. As she put it in one story, “One morning Eggy just perkered up.” That story was called “Eggy Goes to Hawaii.”

This final story is called “The Boy Who Fell to Brooklyn.”

In December 2000, a group of us who could remember the crash gathered at noon on Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue. It was the only memorial to mark the fortieth anniversary of the disaster, at a street corner where the sole reminder is a vacant lot amid rows of million-dollar brownstones.

The only official memorial to the collision is in the hospital chapel: a tiny plaque that includes Stephen's coins. Sometimes, after I get annoyed with the selection of books at the Barnes and Noble down the block – you won’t find this book there – I stop by to look at the plaque.

It says: “Our tribute to a brave little boy.”

Staring at the coins, I get lost in my thoughts and sometimes get depressed.

But eventually, walking along the streets of Park Slope, I perker up.

The story also appears as the title story in our 99-cent Amazon Kindle ebook, The Boy Who Fell to Brooklyn, a collection of nine stories published over the past four decades.

One of our favorite Times reporters, David W. Dunlap, today published an amazingly wonderful City Room blog post about Stephen's life.

Wednesday Morning in Canarsie: Breakfast at Canarsie Pier

At 7 a.m. today we left Dumbo Books HQ, forsaking Williamsburg, where the death knell is tolling for Toll Brothers and other real estate developers, for the open spaces and fresh waters of Canarsie Pier.

We muscled aside a pair of seagulls and found a comfortable bench to bunk on for a few hours and eat our bagel, drink our tea and read the paper.

We used to come here a lot in the 1970s. Our forthcoming book from Superstition Mountain Press, Autumn in Brooklyn: September-November 1978, contains this section of a diary entry for Sunday, November 5, 1978:

I walked along the pier in Canarsie this afternoon – it was yet another beautiful day – and I watched people fishing dreamily and intently but always patiently. I admire their ability to wait; I don’t have it, and I’m afraid that unless I acquire patience, my life will be very unhappy.

Here I am in this diary; I can’t fool you. People may think that I’m a great success or an egotist or a decent, well-meaning guy, but everything comes down to these pages, where I seek refuge because I can’t hide here. I need more discipline and more patience and a great deal more courage.

Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara that people with courage don’t require the esteem of others. In a way I see myself as this kind of figure, but in many ways I am not.

Maybe a couple of years ago this would have been a self-lacerating depression, but one of the comforts of growing older is becoming more tolerant of myself. Someday – not too far away, I hope – I may yet become the writer. . . I was going to say “the writer I need to be,” but what I really mean is “the writer who doesn’t need to be any kind of writer.”

I’m young, and my ideas aren’t very complex yet – though they’re much more mature than they were. This morning, shaving, I wondered if writing for me was just a means to an end – success – and that, if circumstances had been different, I would have used politics or acting or athletics to achieve my real goal.

Sad to say, a lot of my need for success is mean-spirited. I simply want to “show up” people who have never believed in me – people like my parents’ friends the Cohens, or my Italian neighbors, or the kids who rejected me and ridiculed me.
Often I’m scared at how much I want fame, what I’m willing to do to get it.

Okay, the author was just a stupid kid . . .

On our way back, we walked under the Belt Parkway

and over to the shopping center where a CVS has replaced a movie theater, The Seaview, that we wrote about in "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," originally published at Eyeshot and collected in our book And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street:

This was a small cinema in a strip shopping center in Canarsie, opening when Eugene and I were old enough to use the word cinema. We saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg here, and Dr. Zhivago. At fifteen, we were blown away by Blow-Up but confused by the mimes playing tennis without a ball at the end. It definitely was not Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

A couple of years later, I went alone to the Seaview to see Wild in the Streets, falling in love with the utter coolness of Christopher Jones as the rock star who becomes President when teens are allowed to vote. When I got home, I recounted the plot to my ten-year-old twin step-cousins, Alice and Bonnie, who stood open-mouthed as I described how Jones put everyone over 30 in concentration camps – even his mother, Shelley Winters, screaming as they led her away, “But I’m the biggest mother of them all!”

The Seaview is now just another store in a strip mall.

We walked across the street to get the B42 bus up Rockaway Parkway. It's a free transfer to the L train because the first and last stop of the route is inside the train station so you don't need a second MetroCard swipe.

But we were on our way to the Junction, so we got off at Rockaway Parkway. Walking down a block, we went to see the Canarsie branch library. In our story "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn," originally published at Fiction Warehouse, which is gone, but also collected in And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, we write about this library:

On Rockaway Parkway and Avenue J, this branch is one of the few Brooklyn libraries not to have a book drop. I learned that when I was almost thirteen, a couple of years after the building opened.

It was the Sunday before my bar mitzvah reception, and we had to go across the street to the men’s formalwear shop. I figured that while my brothers were trying on their dinner jackets, I could return an overdue copy of Manhattan Transfer to the Canarsie branch. I’d pay the thirty cents fine the next time I borrowed a book.

I looked everywhere for the slot where I could drop in John Dos Passos’s novel. When I gave up and ran back across Rockaway Parkway, Dad was in front of the mirror in his tuxedo and he seemed really annoyed that we’d have to stop off at another library on the way home. He told me I should have checked in advance to see if Canarsie had a book drop.

Not yet a man for another six days, I had assumed all libraries had to have one.

Dad said I took too much for granted.

We wait for the B6 Limited bus outside Holy Family Church, where our friend Janice's funeral mass was held in the summer of 1980. We wrote about Janice's last days in "Land of Golden Giants," originally published at FRiGG and later also collected in And To Think That He Kissed Her on Lorimer Street.

In this part, we're picking up our grandfather at New York Hospital, where he's been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and taking him back to Rockaway, where our apartment was 15 blocks from his. Janice was dying across the street at Sloan-Kettering:

I’m going to drive him back to Rockaway today, back home to die—though it will be slow, because the tumor is pretty small right now. Maybe he’ll continue to feel OK for months or even years.

I’ll have to remember to change my car’s radio station from WQXR because listening to classical music makes Grandpa Herb nervous. I’ll put on WEVD, a station old Jewish people like. Grandpa Herb once told me the call letters stand for Eugene V. Debs, the socialist for whom he cast his first vote for President.

“Well, I’ll go visit my friend for a while,” I tell my grandfather.

“Just get back here by twelve,” he says. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”

I get up from my chair, and on my way out, I nod to my grandfather’s roommate, the cartoonist Edward Sorel, who is looking over what seem to be galleys with his wife and collaborator, Nancy, a writer. They nod back and smile.

Grandpa Herb has told Ed Sorel that I’d had a book of short stories published last year, that I got some nice reviews, but that I can’t seem to make a dime as a writer.

“You never make money from books,” Ed Sorel told my grandfather. Grandpa Herb wasn’t familiar with Ed’s work, but he understood he was kind of famous so I could tell he respected Ed’s opinion.

The temperature is in the 90s already. Crossing first East 68th and then York, I look forward to being back in the air conditioning of another hospital. Sloan-Kettering is always chilly.

After getting my visitor’s pass, I take the elevator up to where Janice’s room is. Unlike my grandfather and Ed Sorel, she is alone.

My friend Linda Konner, whom I’ve known since second grade at P.S. 203, introduced me to Janice a few years ago. One night Linda took me to Janice’s house in Canarsie, near the terminus of the LL train off Rockaway Parkway, to play Scrabble and smoke pot and drink wine with Janice and her friend Dolores.

They were about ten years older than Linda and I, but I liked them both immediately. Dolores was earthy and warm and worked at a health food store in Soho. Janice worked as a graphic artist, but she also made her own art and was involved in starting a cooperative among visual artists in Brooklyn. They rented a storefront downtown, near Fulton Street, and used it as a gallery to display their work. But it was hard to get people to come from Manhattan to see it, as nobody believed that real artists would live in Brooklyn.

Janice was tall and rangy. She had a Halloween party one year and dressed as Fritzi Ritz, the aunt in the Nancy comic strip; I thought the part seemed like a natural for her. The first night I met her, I asked her what she thought of conceptual art.

“I can’t conceive of such a thing,” she said.

Janice was a widow, probably the only person I know who had lost a spouse except maybe for some girls from the neighborhood who married guys who died in Vietnam. Her husband died of some degenerative disease. She didn’t talk about it, but I once looked through her family albums. He’d been a handsome, robust Polish guy, a boxer, and you could see him fading away, picture by picture, month by month, until the photos were just Janice and her daughter, Ingrid, alone or with other relatives.

Janice didn’t talk about her husband much. Once, when telling a nurse that she had a daughter named Ingrid, she said, “My husband worshipped Ingrid Bergman.”

They won’t let me in Janice’s room right away because the doctors or nurses are doing something. I wait in the corridor and nearby is an old woman lying on a gurney, her skin a shade of green I have never seen before on a human being. It wasn’t like the “ You look green” when people are seasick or about to vomit. It was actual green green, like the skin of J’onn J’onzz, the Manhunter from Mars.

How were such things possible?

Janice got the breast cancer diagnosis just a week after I met her. So she’s been sick throughout the few years of our friendship, and I’ve visited her in other hospitals, like Brookdale close to home back in Brooklyn.

Brookdale, at the intersection of Linden Boulevard and Rockaway Parkway, was where Janice had her mastectomy. It was also the hospital where my brothers and I were born, back when it was Beth El Hospital. Grandpa Herb has told me that poor Jewish women like his mother, Bubbe Ita, would put nickels in a charity box every week in the 1920s to raise money to build the hospital for the community.

When she first told me she was going into Sloan-Kettering, Janice always referred to it as “Sloan Catering.” She called this stretch of York Avenue, with all its hospitals, “Bedpan Alley.” Now Janice is far too sick to pun. When I finally get to see her, I am grateful she recognizes me. The last time I was there, the nurse told me that she doesn’t have much time left.

The last time we went anywhere together, I drove her to the Foundation Library to do some research for some artists’ grants she was trying to get for the cooperative. But she got very tired very quickly, and we couldn’t go to an exhibit at Asia House next door as we’d planned. I had to put her seat back so she could lie down on the drive back to Brooklyn.

Now Janice needs an oxygen mask a lot of the time. The cancer has ravaged not only her body but also her face. Her eyes look so old and tired.

“Richie,” she asks, “do you have any paper?”

“Yes,” I say. “I can get it. What do you want me to write?”

The TV is on, it’s channel 13, and they are showing some documentary featuring an ancient Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the composer. Janice’s attention is momentarily fixed on the TV set, and she says, “ That woman loved Hitler so.”

“Yeah,” I say.

And then Janice returns to what she wanted the paper for. “You need to make a Percocet chart,” she tells me.

“Uh huh,” I say, getting out a pen and taking out the receipt from the New York Hospital parking lot to write on.

“Make a list of all the times and the times I can have another Percocet.”

“OK,” I say, “I’m doing that right now.”

“Good,” Janice says, and she watches Winifred Wagner for a while, occasionally glancing over to see what progress I’m making with the Percocet chart. Mostly I’m writing down numerals at random.

“Richie,” Janice says, all out of breath. “Want to put makeup on?”

“I don’t wear makeup, Janice.”

“No. On me.”

“I think girls look prettier without makeup on,” I say. “The natural look.”

She smiles beatifically, closes her eyes, and I feel that I have said something good. When her eyes are closed for a while, I see that she is sleeping, not dead, and I sit there for about ten minutes watching her and looking at the Winifred Wagner interview on TV. Finally, I get up and leave quietly.

As I go downstairs and again walk in the Manhattan heat across York Avenue to fetch my grandfather and take him home to Rockaway—where at least it will be ten degrees cooler—I think about my last lunch with Dolores and how upset she was, falling apart even, about Janice’s impending death. I’d always thought Dolores was so strong, like an earth mother, and in that Soho restaurant I found myself comforting her. It was a reversal I didn’t like.

Dolores said that Janice’s sister and brother-in-law would take over everything. “They’re so Italian,” she said, although Dolores was Italian herself. “So truly Canarsie.”

Mostly she was worried about Ingrid, who was now fifteen. Janice wanted her to live with her cousin, another artist in the downtown Brooklyn cooperative, who wouldn’t fill Ingrid’s head with all that Catholic stuff and conservative ideas that Janice’s brother-in-law and sister would shove down the girl’s throat.

But Janice hadn’t made any provisions for guardianship, and Janice’s mother was too old to take Ingrid, so the girl will end up with the Di Falcos.

“She’ll be OK,” I told Dolores. “All Janice’s friends will look out for her.”

My grandfather’s all dressed and packed and looking like a hospital visitor, no longer a patient, in the chair beside the bed. “What’s been keeping you?” he asked. “I’ve been ready for quite a while.”

I pick up his valise, we say goodbye to the Sorels, and Ed wishes me good luck with my writing. In the elevator, Grandpa Herb asks, “How’s your friend?”

“Nicht gut,” I say, wondering why I am speaking German.

Today's a good day. On the bus, we've also passed Avenue L, where the Canarsie Theater used to be, where we saw "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" when we were 15 (we had to be accompanied by our dad, because in thos pre-MPAA rating days, the film was still banned to kids under 18 coming in alone); and Canarsie Laundry, where we worked as a delivery boy in the summer of '75 until we got a call from Long Island University offering us a remedial writing course to teach; and Canarsie High School, where the beginning of the title story of And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, originally published at The Beat (UK) and JMWW, takes place:

In tenth grade at Canarsie High School, I was the founder and only member of SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. To avoid fights, I kept that pretty much to myself.

The first semester of eleventh grade English, I never bothered to read Huckleberry Finn because Miss Shapin introduced it by reverentially reading aloud from the book's opening and humming "NNnnn" when she came to the racial slur.

When she assigned us a book report on an autobiography, I wrote about My Shadow Ran Fast, by a white ex-convict I'd seen interviewed on the Mike Douglas show. She gave me an F and said, "You should have selected a more admirable person."

I found it interesting that Miss Shapin's name described her body. She should have failed me that term, but somehow I passed with a 65 after handing in an essay about my grandmother's manicotti.

As a writer, I have always lucked out.

Still true. We really enjoyed our morning on Canarsie Pier. As another neighborhood oldtimer told the New York Times last week, it's prettier today than it used to be.