Dangerous Escapades Of Reckless Boys

There was a huge building boom in the private home market after World War II.  By August, 1945 there were over twelve million people in the armed forces, and many of them had had their lives on hold for up to five or six years.   Now most of them would be coming home, and they shared a feeling that they had a lot of catching up to do.  Millions of them wanted to get married, drink as much alcohol and smoke as many cigarettes as possible, have a family, drink real coffee, eat steak and eggs, and buy a car and a house.   I was born in Queens, New York City in 1948, and I had a wonderful perch from which to watch the very last vacant lots, small farm plots (!!!) and the few remaining bits of primeval woodland in Queens fill in like the bottom of an hourglass until every square inch of raw land had been occupied by new homes.  

Children had vastly more freedom in the early Fifties than they do now, more, in fact, than was at all sensible in a place as generally unsafe as Queens.  By the age of four I was part of a wandering pack of mostly boys.  We roamed the immediate neighborhood with zero adult supervision.  Our parents trusted us to cross some streets on our own, but not others, and they trusted us to know the difference.  “Come home when the streetlights come on.”  All through my early life it seemed like there were a great number of children within a year or two of my age.  Behind the two-family house that my family lived in was a field of about one acre in size that had never been built upon.  It had been, up to that time, devoted to agriculture, of all things, someone was still growing beans and tomatoes.   I can picture it to this day.  In 1952 or ‘53 it was slated for the construction of the one-family row-houses that became a hallmark of the town in question, which is called College Point.  When they first cleared the land and prepared it for construction it became our favorite place in the world. 

Regarding “College Point,” it actually was a point of land jutting out into the East River (which is actually an estuary, and not a river at all), just east of La Guardia Airport on the north shore of Long Island (which actually is an island).  There had actually been a college there, briefly, but it had been gone for almost a century before I arrived. 

I don’t remember any fencing around any of those construction sites, although I know that many boys did actually get hurt playing around the dirt piles or the half-constructed homes.   The dirt piles!  What better landscape could an army of reckless boys ever hope for?  I recall these dirt piles being very large, but I suppose we must bear in mind that I was very small at the time.   The dirt was very loose, and the piles were very regularly shaped.  We had “dirt bomb” fights with a dozen boys on a side, hurling clods of dirt at one another.  These often degenerated into rock fights, which were much more unpleasant.  We played King of the Hill, gleefully tossing each other down the side of a pile.  We also engaged in an activity that gives me chills to this day, an activity in which many boys famously die, an activity which is one of the reasons that it never fails to amaze me that boys ever grow successfully to manhood at all.

We dug caves into these piles of loose dirt with our hands.  Caves!  We created spaces beneath many hundreds of pounds of loose dirt.  Boys of four, five or six years old, digging out chambers that were big enough for several boys at a time.  I vividly remember being inside of these places.  There was enough natural light to see, albeit dimly, so I suppose that the aperture was always fairly close by. We would just start digging into the pile and make a little chamber as soon as it seemed practical.   You needed to crawl in, though, and luckily I always got out okay and I don’t remember any collapses.  When those things come down around the heads of the occupants the result is often fatal.  Death by misadventure, I think they call it. 

For my towny friends, this all took place on 117^th Street, just south of 12^th Avenue.  The bean field was between 12^th and 14^th Avenues, and between 119^th and 117^th Streets.  118^th Street didn’t go through, because of a sudden change of grade, so sudden that it was almost a cliff.  I lived on 119^th Street at the time, close to the corner of 12^th Avenue.  There were a lot of children on 119^th Street, but they seemed to be mostly girls and their ages didn’t agree with mine.  For me, the real action was around the corner on 118^th Street, the long block between 9^th and 12^th Avenues, where there was an army of boys right around my age.  They were a great bunch of guys.  Some have been quite successful in life; a few have already passed from the scene.  Congratulations, or RIP, whichever is appropriate.

I’m only in contact with a couple of them at this point, but it’s a pleasure to remember them all.  The block itself was very beautiful, lined on both sides with huge, mature trees that blotted out the sun when the leaves were full.  Not a through street, it dead-headed on both sides, so there was not a lot of traffic.  It was a perfect place to play Hide-and-Seek, or Tag, or any of the many games that we enjoyed.  We played games that required no equipment, games that had very few rules, games that had almost nothing to interfere with the fun.   Those were good times.  I say to you all, wherever you are, that you were good, if often imperfect friends, and I remember each of you fondly, and I forgive you your imperfections.  As the three time loser said to the judge upon sentencing:  your honor, whom amongst us is perfect?  I ask you only to forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive you.  Bon chance, my friends.  I’m so very glad that we all survived those impromptu caves.  

Morbid Anxiety And The Threat Of Being Challenged

My life has been a long exercise in the avoidance of being challenged.  It has happened, however, and I must admit that I have generally done better than I had expected in challenging situations.  “Challenging,” ha!  When you read what I consider challenging, you’ll think that this is a humor piece.

I’m thinking primarily of personal challenges, but the world itself was a very challenging place when I was a boy.  Society was faced with the aftermath of World War II; Korea; the Cold War; the ever present threat of nuclear destruction; Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement.  Then Camelot . . . and then JFK’s assassination.  It’s hard for anyone who was not on hand for that shocking event to understand just what a profound impact it had on the top to bottom of American society.  It was like splashing boiling water on a toddler, a deep and powerful trauma, indeed a re-set moment. 

The years from 1964 to 1967 were the years when America grew up.  By 1967, people were seeing things like the Vietnam War more naturalistically.  In 1968, even Walter Chronkite was saying on TV that “war is foolish.”  Growing up somewhat did not bring the onset of wisdom, though, and things only seemed to progress from bad to worse, and in leaps and bounds too.  Institutional racism fought back vigorously against the small advances made in civil rights, and we were treated to the spectacle of the extrajudicial murder of Black Panthers like Fred Hampton.  There was more to come, including Nixon and Watergate, the oil embargo, and the beginnings of a new brand of mass incarceration masquerading as a “War on Crime,” etc.  By 1980, America had become very cynical. 

Personal Challenges

Challenging situations can be merely exciting, like appearing on Jeopardy, or they can be truly terrifying, like being in the first wave landing on Omaha Beach.  In either case there are likely to be some residual effects once calm has been restored.  This may vary from a pleasant thrill upon remembrance to the inescapable horror of full blown PTSD.  All shades of experience are represented, and all degrees of aftereffects may be observed as well.

 

My own personal challenges might seem like garden snakes to many people, but to me they were mighty king cobras, I can tell you.  The challenge of learning how to deal with my parents was so depressing, and the effort so doomed to failure, that I am still haunted by it.  (And that will be my only comment on the subject.)  Navy boot camp was, I think, a challenge well met.  I amazed myself by doing fine and getting through it with no trouble at all (although they do seem to have marked my file, “do not let this young man anywhere near our ships or explosives”).  Law school, at the age of forty, was another one, another amazing surprise.  Law school, followed immediately by the bar exam and actual law work, is an effort that is sustained and heroic.  I got through that fine as well.  I met all my goals, clerking in a law office during my third year, graduating in the exact middle of my class and passing the California bar on my first try.  Notice that I prefer modest goals.  I’m sure that there are reasons for that, reasons based in my boyhood.

Which is the challenge that I’d like to discuss. 

Maybe, dear reader, you were one of the lucky ones, and you grew up in a town where it was an easy matter to become one of the boys, or one of the girls, and everyone kind of got along with only a smidge of that common cruelty that children sometimes encounter in other children.  We were not so lucky in my town.  I was a boy in a working class enclave of the New York City borough of Queens.  It was an isolated town of about 30,000 residents called College Point.  The East River wound around one side, and of the four roads that led to town, three ran through a barely drained swamp and were subject to regular flooding.  It was a rough place.

I adopted this formulation many years ago: we were hit by our parents at home; we were hit by the nuns at school; and when we were on our own, we hit each other.  It was a challenge to fit in, not to mention the insurmountable difficulty in trying to make sense of it. 

I was a sensitive boy, kind of day-dreamy, and I did not take naturally to all of the fighting.  Many of the boys that had temperaments similar to mine simply chose to stay at home at all times.  They went to school, certainly, but after school they went directly home and stayed there.  You just never saw them, unless it was on the bus after school.  And in those situations, the odds were that one of the other boys was drumming on their head with a pencil or something.  Staying home wasn’t an option for me.  My agenda was to spend as little time at home as possible.  Whatever was going on outside, home was worse, more dangerous and unpredictable. 

Besides, I enjoyed the games and the running around wild, the dirt-bomb fights, throwing snow balls at cars, playing with matches, I enjoyed everything but the bullying and the fighting. 

Between home, school, and the outside world of the boys, I was afraid most of the time.  That kind of situation is corrosive of the brain itself, not to mention the soul.  The challenge of learning to be a boy in College Point was one that I was not up to, and I’m paying the price for that failure to this day.   

Mea maxima culpa!  But it’s okay.  I haven’t written this by way of complaining.  Any failure for which only one person pays is small potatoes, by definition.  Besides, I’ve almost gotten used to the price that I pay in morbid anxiety.  It won’t be much longer anyway; that's the way of all flesh.  I saw a beautiful photo of Katherine Hepburn on Facebook this morning, with a quote.  “Life is hard,” she is reported to have said, “it kills us all, you know.”