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Chapter 4: When Empty, Return to Camden, New Jersey" © Visions of the Hill My train made good time heading back toward Camden, at the end of my runaway summer in 1967, the summer I turned thirteen. The freight train, and my empty hobo boxcar, occasionally was held up in one switching yard or another, which gave me enough time to forage for food and water. I had been gone almost the entire summer. I knew once I got home and my parents were over the initial shock of seeing me alive I was in for one hell of an ass whooping and a long solitary confinement in my room. But I wasn't the scared little kid anymore that had trembled at the anger of my parents or Sister Superior. I intended to assess the punishment they had in mind. If it was more than I felt like enduring I was going to just walk back down to the freight yard and move on, hopping the first open boxcar to anywhere. And no matter what, I had decided, I was not going back to Catholic school. I felt strong; I thought I didn't need anyone to depend on anymore. But I missed Cramer Hill, my brother, sisters and friends, and would do all I could to stay. I was so beat I slept most of the time on the train. Sometimes the rocky motion and hard floor would only allow a "half-sleep". I was often awake enough to know I was dreaming. In my dreams I had visions of the Hill past, and not knowing it at the time, visions of the future. I dreamt of all the Sunday mornings I had awoke before sunrise, for as many years as I could remember, in all seasons, to collect nickel-deposit soda bottles. Every Saturday night I would roam the back alleys of Cramer Hill, where the crickets serenaded cats in the dark. I went about, peeping in people's windows and making mental notes of who was having parties. I observed adults interacting in various degrees of civility: Gentlemen graciously and respectfully attending to women with courtly manners, women responding likewise. Wild dance parties with jazz or early rock inflaming passions of young and old. In dimmed rooms I often saw one couple, maybe more, humping, moaning and groaning. Drunks getting drunker, laughing, arguing, singing. Families playing board games, eating ice cream, watching TV together. Wife beaters, rotten abusive children young and old, aging Beatniks and bookworms. Every generation playing their own music, talking their own language. Optimists and pessimists, the bitter and the sweet. Lonely old people, sitting by a dim lamp, staring at nothing, remembering everything. I felt invisible; my face always so close to the action, yet no one ever seemed to notice me. In the morning I would find their empty bottles in wooden cases that they intended to redeem for cash. The early bird gets the worm. My antennae were always up. If I had tuned in that a boy planned to beat me to the bottles, I would just get up earlier and beat him. I wasn't the only competitor for cash redeemable bottles: only the best. Sometimes we would bump into each other on our Saturday night scouts. "Hey, what are you doing?" someone would ask. "Oh, nothing, just spying, seeing what's going on." "Shit!" you would think to yourself. "I'm going to have to get up extra early tomorrow." Spying was not hard for an invisible boy under the age of say, eleven. (All boys are invisible at that age if they want to be; it's just a certain way of acting that causes people to pay you no mind. It appears unconsciously done, but is done with a talent for surreptitiousness that peaks by eleven and then naturally wanes after that. If you are skilled, you can carry it on for a couple more years, but your rising self-consciousness and increase in physical size eventually does you in.) Cramer Hill is a dense neighborhood of "Row-Homes". If you can picture a comb, laying flat on a table, and looking down on it, you can imagine the layout of the homes. The entire row consisted of about twelve homes, sharing a common porch. The porches were divided every fifteen feet by a railing low enough for you to easily hop over. People could sit on their porch and talk past their immediate neighbors to their neighbor's three doors down. During summer evenings just about everyone was on their porch and the criss-crossed conversations went on all night long. The porches also shared a common roof. The roof was level with the bottom windowsill of everyone's three-sectioned master bedroom bay window. So if you wanted to visit your neighbor next door in their front bedroom, all you had to do was step out of your bedroom window onto the porch roof and take one step into their bedroom window. The living rooms and upper half of the upstairs all shared a firewall between each house, but the "space between the comb teeth" represented a slim alley between the kitchens downstairs and the upper back bedrooms. If you had a strong long plank, you could extend it to your neighbor friend's bedroom window and crawl on your hands and knees between each other's homes, secreted from parents, as we often did. In the kitchen you and your neighbor could lean out and exchange ketchup and spices easily and often. You could hear conversations going on at your neighbor's dinner table as easily as your own. Everyone knew each others business and none of it seemed to matter. The neighborhood was crowded and busy. Depending on the season, the streets were full, with posing leather jacketed "Greaser's" whose minds were still in the 'fifties, hanging on the sidewalks or leaning on cars. They would sway, hum along and snap their fingers to The Four Seasons, Frankie Avalon, Dion and others. The "Baby-Boom" had boomed big in Cramer Hill, and there just didn't seem to be enough room for such a multitude of kids. Street games of every sort overlapped each other's boundaries. "Kick the Can", "Hide-The-Belt" and "Rag-A-Muffin-Freeze" were some of the most popular. In "Kick-The-Can", the can was placed in a spot in the street that was to be guarded by a person chosen to be "It". Everyone else hid. As in "Hide-And-Go-Seek", the "it" person would search for the hiding. When he found someone, he would call out their name and both would run to the can. If he touched the can before the found person, that person was "out". If the found person got there first, he would kick the can as hard as he could, "freeing" everyone who had been found before him. The "It" person would run and fetch the can and return it to its previous spot as fast as he could, all the while trying to keep track of where the escapees were scampering to hide. He would call out the names of each whose hiding spot he knew and they would return voluntarily to "jail". Eventually, with cunning fake moves that would draw out would be "heroes" attempting to free comrades, he would "capture" the remaining fugitive who would become "It". "Hide-The-Belt" had similar elements. A safe "base" would be designated. Everyone turned away and closed their eyes as someone hid the belt, usually a thick strap with a big heavy buckle. Everyone would scatter, looking for the belt high and low. The one who hid it would say, "cold, colder, warm, getting warmer, hot, hot as hell," as someone would near finding the belt. Everyone would converge and group tightly around the "hot-spot," until someone found the belt. The person who found the belt had the privilege (usually taken advantage of enthusiastically) to whip and beat everyone and anyone as he chased them back to the base. Sometimes your heart would stop for a second in terror when one of the crueler boys found the belt. Whipping with the buckle or leather was at the option and discretion of the finder. Everyone was so crowded around the "hot-spot" until the belt was found that it was hard to clear a path and run to the safety of the base. By the time we made it safely to base, several boys had welts on their cheeks or neck, or a bloody eye that was caught by the buckle. It was not a game to play while wearing shorts. The one who found the belt got to hide it. We would play round after round until it was time to go home, bloody and sore, laughing all the way. "Rag-A-Muffin-Freeze" was even more brutal and fun. Ten or more boys would form a tight circle, with the most daring boy volunteering to be "It" first placed in the center. The object of the game was to punch the kid in the middle without him seeing or guessing correctly that it was you. If he saw you out of the corner of his eye punch him, or guessed correctly and called out your name, the entire circle would collapse on you and pummel the living day-lights out of you while you counted "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten Rag-A-Muffins-Freeze!" By eight or nine you were usually on the ground curled up in a protective fetal position counting as fast as you could. Then everyone would freeze, stand up and reform the circle. Now you were "It" and had to orbit within the circle, eyes darting and body spinning, body and head being peppered with jabs, until you could correctly finger someone who had nailed you. Not having eyes in the back of your head, this was more difficult than it may seem. Sometimes you were in there beyond the limit of your endurance, bent over in agony. But there was no quitting without an automatic last round of everyone getting a free shot until you completed the count. Then you could, (hopefully) walk away. The worse thing that could happen to you was to have someone hit you in the back so hard it completely knocked your breath out and you couldn't speak. Once the Rag-A-Muffins realized you couldn't say their names even if you where looking them straight in the eye, they really let you have it. It could get so bad you had to run. But once your breath had come back, you returned to the center of the circle and resumed playing, if you had any sense and knowledge about male status and surviving in "The Hill". The danger of the game was the thrill, and you always recovered fully in two or three days anyway. I was small for my age, before I had my growth spurt, and tended to lose most fights. I just didn't have the arm or upper-body strength to out-box or wrestle anyone. And it seemed like almost everyday someone was trying to start a fight with me, causing me to vary my routes home from school or humiliating me in front of others. By the time I was ten or eleven I was pissed and fuming enough about the whole situation to stop fighting fair and start fighting dirty. Instead of "putting my dukes up and fighting like a man" I would immediately lunge at my opponent, before he even realized I was "taking him on", growl and scream like a terrifying banshee, while trying to bite his nose, ears, cheeks or shoulder. The days of anyone who actually knew me ever fighting me after that quickly ended. I gained a reputation as a "nut' which lasted and allowed me to live-on fairly unchallenged. I still had to occasionally deal with those happenstance times of coming across troublemakers who were complete strangers, but my "screaming, biting Banshee" act, hardened by years of "Rag-A-Muffin-Freeze" pulled me through. But I never liked fighting, and I didn't want to be grouped in anyone's mind with the rude, crude boys I knew as "fighters". On Friday nights the big green skating bus would come down River Road, the heart of Cramer Hill, and pick up kids at 33rd street, and take us to a rink on the far edge of the city, in a different neighborhood entirely. It not only was a fun place to skate, but was the first stop of "maturity" for pre-teens and young teens to express their budding desires and ideas of romance. I would iron my permanent press pants over and over again until the crease was sharp as a razor. The highboy collar of my pin-stripped shirt was stiff and starched. My hair was heavy with VO-5. A quarter bottle of Jade East cologne or Brut added the finishing touch. On the bus we would sing Beatles, Kinks, Herman's Hermits, Rolling Stones, Supremes, Four Tops, Martha and the Vandella's. It was on the skating bus that I first saw a picture of the Beatles. A girl in the back of the bus held up a glossy 8 x 11 and she was nearly crushed to death as we pressed and groped for a better glimpse of it. This was before their debut on the Ed Sullivan show. It would be the last time I ever put VO5 on my hair. Becoming old enough (ten) to board the skating bus was another exciting rite of passage for Cramer Hill kids. Everyone went, and it was where many met their first boyfriend or girlfriend, holding hands during a "couples only" routine, or a Sadie Hawkins "ladies choice". I had been saving money from my artificial flower sales for months in preparation of my tenth birthday and first trip to the Fairview Roller Rink. My mother convinced me she could get me a great deal on roller skates, so I gave her the money. She returned with a black pair with black synthetic rubber wheels. "Rubber wheels?" I had never seen any skates that didn't have wooden wheels. "Synthetic rubber wheels. It's the new modern thing," she assured me. "Soon everyone will be using synthetic rubber wheels." When I showed up at the skating rink admissions window, my skates slung over my shoulder, the ticket lady said "What the hell kind of skates are those?" "They're synthetic rubber wheeled!" I said proudly. She looked at me suspiciously as she took my money and passed me in. I hurriedly slipped off my shoes and slid them under the bench. Impatiently I laced up my soon to be all the rage rubber wheeled skates, I, the first to own a pair! It was my first time on roller skates and I looked like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz taking his first steps. I twisted and fell several times; that was okay. I expected that. I quickly got the hang of it. Now all I was thinking about was "gentleman's choice" and "ladies choice", eyeing the girls, heart pounding and wondering, which one I would soon be holding hands with. Every girl would want to skate with the boy with the sharp, futuristic synthetic rubber black wheels! Before that there were other routines. The Hokey-Pokey, (you put your left foot in, you pull your left foot out, you put your left foot in and then you shake it all-about!) Or Musical Chair type games where you had to be in one of the circles when the music stopped. Each time the music stopped, the number of qualified circles was reduced, reducing the number of eligible skaters. The finalist won a free pass or gift certificate to the snack bar. The snack bar area was where the guys who thought they were too cool to skate hung out. When they weren't playing pinball they lurked, leaned and posed all slick and leathered, attracting some of the prettiest girls by some mysterious magnetism. I had been practicing for an hour now, getting better and more confident with every lap. My attention was increasingly drawn to a pretty girl my age, who not only obviously was new to skating, but also was intent on skating on one foot. Every time she put her right foot down, she would raise it up slowly and glide on her left, barely keeping her balance. It was her funny, awkward way and determination that drew at first, but the more I studied her, the lovelier she seemed. I was becoming completely charmed. When they called "gentleman's choice" I was by her side in a flash. I reached out my hand to her without saying anything. "No," she said, "I'd rather not." My heart sank. "But you have to. It's gentleman's choice, I'm a gentleman and I choose you." "I have to?" "You have to." Reluctantly she took my hand and I led her out onto the floor. The warm tenderness of her hand made me feel good in a way I had never known before. She squeezed my hand tighter and tighter. "My name is Colm O'Malley. What's your's?" "Bridgett. Bridgett Donovan," she told me in an irritated, distracted manner. She persisted in trying to skate on one foot and was always in a state of nearly falling. "Why don't you just skate on two feet for now and get fancy when you've had more practice?" "I'm not trying to be fancy. This is my first time here. My father gave me a dime to call him in case of an emergency and told me to put it in my sock so I wouldn't lose it. It's giving me a blister!" "Well, you better get it out of there. Let me help you off the floor." She swayed and jerked sharply one way and then the other. I tried to anticipate which way she would lean next but just couldn't. "Let me roll off by myself. I think that's better." I thought so too, and sadly watched her go. She had just about made it when she lifted her right foot one time too many and fell hard, breaking her arm. A crowd swarmed around her and I couldn't even get close. I drifted down to the far end of the lounge and sat on a bench, waiting for the halted action to resume. I assured myself she would be fine, and pondered the irony, of the dime to be used in case of an emergency actually causing the emergency. As soon as the stretcher that bore the unfortunate girl was out the door, the rink captain's voice boomed "Speed skaters only!" and bedlam broke out as all the wild boys' raced onto the floor. I was in the thick of the pack, pushing off hard and as excited as the rest. It was just the intensity I needed to get her out of my mind. Taking long hard strides, I dug down and powered out of every corner curve. Man I was flying! Boys zipped by at various speeds. Occasionally we reached out and gently touched each other, signifying we were about to pass, wanting to avoid a tangled fall. Every time I touched a boy a huge, crackling flash of static electricity would erupt between us. I thought that was just the way it was, but many of the boys shrieked and spun wildly out of control. I disregarded the fallen bodies accumulating around me, thinking that was what a lot of boys liked to do during the speed skate; push themselves to their limit. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, thinking I must be a much better skater than I thought, since I was just about the only one not spun out and writhing on the floor. I was improving and picking up speed at every turn, leaning way over, swinging my right arm to power my rhythm, my left tucked up behind my back. The girls must really be eyeing me! The referee's whistle suddenly blew shrill and maniacally, as if an emergency was quickly unfolding. The referees and rink captain made a beeline directly to me. "What kind of god damn wheels are they? You're electrocuting everybody!" I glanced at the floored speed skaters. "They're synthetic rubber wheels. The latest new thing." I said meekly. They grabbed me by the arms, electricity crackling around us, and threw me hard through the gate into the lounge. "Look what you did to the floor you little asshole!" one of the ref's screamed at me. I sat up and saw that the rink was covered with hundreds of black streaks from my wheels. The floor looked ruined. Everyone groaned and avoided me like the plague. "You're out of here!" the rink captain screamed in my face. It was a long walk home. The skating bus passed me on the way. I heard shouts but couldn't make them out. The absurdity of the evening eventually dawned on me, and I almost cried, but laughed hard like a crazy person instead. Tomorrow I would be telling the story to my friends, embellishing it as best I could, for they would have just as good if not better ones to tell. They say birds of a feather flock together, and like finds like. Well, we found each other. It seemed like anytime we had to rely on our parents, or they got involved in our lives, something half-ass or goofy would come out of it. At our tender age, we knew we were a pack of losers. Just bound to lose. Stuff like this was always happening to us. The losingest bunch that ever lost. And we reveled in trying to out-do each other's experiences. "Oh yeah, you think you felt stupid, well let me tell you what happened to me…" Having to walk, I arrived home almost an hour later than my curfew. I interrupted my mother's wrath to get my story through; about how the skates ruined the rink and I had to walk home. "Where did you get the idea to buy these?" I asked. "You know what your problem is? You don't appreciate a friggin' thing anybody does for you!" she spit out disdainfully, waving me off with a disgusted flick of the wrist. She always talked like that. I never knew a man with a filthier mouth. She ran off from home at fifteen and was pregnant with me at sixteen, and married before she was seventeen. My brother Patrick came along less than ten months after me, my sister Maire less than ten months after him and little sister Kate nine and a half months after her. My mother was bitter and felt the world had wronged her, but what did she expect for getting mixed up with a drunken shiftless bullshit artist whose big aspiration in life was to be the next Frank Sinatra? You'd think she would have wised-up a long time ago. But no. Up the street from us was a place called "Pete's Auction". He auctioned off manufacturers rejects that he would buy (or so we thought) in bulk. He auctioned off the craziest, most useless things imaginable, but there was always a crowd in there bidding and buying. The prices were so low you couldn't resist buying, whether you had a need for the thing or not. Pete had the greasy demeanor of a fast talking carny' barker. I used to stand on the corner near Pete's, in the coldest of weather, stomping my feet and rubbing my hands to keep warm. No matter how miserable the weather, no weather was rotten enough to compete with the weather in my house. Kids would talk about their favorite TV shows like Batman or the The Fugitive. I never knew what they were talking about. I had never watched a TV show. To do that I would have had to be in the house, the last place I ever wanted to be. One night, before my curfew was up, the temperature dropped to seven painful degrees below zero. I went into Pete's Auction and watched as he auctioned off dozens of black synthetic rubber wheeled roller skates for a fraction of the money I had given my mother. The train crunched to a halt, and I awoke with a head swirling with those memories, and visions of the Hill. |