Going Home
“When am I
going to see your ugly face?” She is 83 and lives in Brooklyn, my ancestral
home.
“One of these days, Mom. Soon.” I was
just there last week, visiting, having dinner, playing gin, eating a bagel,
taking walks with her.
Mom is an involuntary time traveler, I wouldn’t think of
jarring her space or time continuum by pointing out my recent visit.
“I’ll check the calendar and see when I can get there. Maybe for Louis’ son’s bar mitzvah next
month.” I should just be flattered
she looks forward to my future visit as the past hangs on tattered threads. She
sleeps with my father’s bathrobe covering her feet. The last time he wore it
was many years past, yet he is still comforting her.
Imagine, if you will, as Rod Serling fades into a
black-and-white world. Go
back. Go all the way back. Go home. You can go home again.
Time traveling is possible.
But, you need to reconfigure your thinking. The world you are familiar with, through the fragile veil of
memory is left best undisturbed with modern tools. It doesn’t exist, searching is an exercise in futility. Leave your video cam home. Take the junkiest, ugliest, can’t-get-film
for this anymore camera you can find and start at the beginning. Look for a camera with a name like
Lubitel, Banner, Holga or Diana-bad quality, but forgiving. I will offer my odyssey as a road map
for yours. Use what you like; take
what you want. “Imagine, if you will…”
Brooklyn in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s was the hub of the
universe. The Dodgers were where
they belonged, at Ebbets Field and Los Angeles as a world away. Sometimes in visiting the pas and
feeling a need to document, there is simply nothing or no one left. Duke Snider moved to Fallbrook, big
Number 14, Carl Furillo, hands as big as a shovel, is buried and Ebbets Field,
home of legendary battles for the pennant with the Giants, series battles with
the Yankees are gone. Ebbets Field
is a housing project. They paved
paradise and put in a parking lot.
Pavko at third, Reese at Short, Junior Gilliam at second, Furillo at
first, Snider, Robinson, Gomez in the outfield and a battery of Newcombe and
Campanella are gone.
Dad was the N.Y.C. cop whose beat frequently included the
field. When I was between the ages
of 5 and 11, I was his frequent undercover companion. My first stop is not as much as marked by a bronze
plaque. The weekends of my
childhood are replaced by the brick and uniformity of a housing project. L.A. got the team and Brooklyn got the
shaft.
Down
the street a bit is the Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Museum, one of the best
museums in the city, far from mainstream Manhattan, with more security guards
than visitors. Its semicircular
driveway opening onto Empire Boulevard.
It’s the cultural queen of the borough of kings. Gratefully, the main display areas are
being remodeled to re-create the design of elegance 100-years old.
I
take a walk up Flatbush Avenue, past Winthrop where Bruce Bobiner lived, past
Maple where Greenberg was, up to Hawthorne where I stand in a courtyard and
look up at a window where my mother would wrap 15 cents in a tissue when I
shouted up to the second floor “Maaa, Good Humor is here….throw down some
money.” Where California looks across a landscape, New York is always looking
up at windows or down to a street.
A
large man approaches me and asks “Whaddyadoinghere?” I explain, “I used to live
there……in 2D.”
“That
must have been a long, long time ago.” With subtly and grace, he describes the
changing demographics of city neighborhoods. The doorway entrance is now
protected by heavy metal signaling both security and danger. The courtyard
where boxball was king is circumnavigated by concertina wire.
Father
down Flatbush is Erasmus Hall High School. Home of over 8,000 adolescents. The
school now boasts a security system to keep “dangerous elements” out. An
earlier generation was more casual. The major danger was spring fever,
senior-itis, and the vitriolic nature of the clique.
The
“D” train stops at Avenue P. Home to the most eclectic handball (blackball)
games ever invented. This is the land that spawned Bobby Riggs. On any given
day, you can see teen-age Puerto Rican boys and 60-year-old Jewish men playing
on the same courts. Handicaps are established with a player carrying a beach
chair or a bucket of water. Onlookers are major participants in the verbal
supports and attacks. These games have changed the least, the tournaments seem
continuous, fluid competitions from the 50s.
From
here the journey continues on the subway. A misnomer as it rises above ground
and forms the “El” or elevated to Brighton Beach. The former green Dutch-door
lockers that were shared by my father and his six brothers, is closed and
beyond normal winter disrepair. They await demolition and rebirth as “luxury
beachfront apartments.” The influx of Russians has led to the renaming of
Brighton as “Odessa by the Sea.” Mrs. Stahl’s knishes are still the culinary
highlight of the day.
Walking
to the end of the street, to the Boardwalk, turn east toward Coney Island. Only
three subway stops (Elevated) or a 45-minute walk through crowds of strollers,
wheelchairs, domino, chess and card players. I walk toward the inert parachute
jump that defines the skyline—The iron edifice that acts as the Eiffel Tower of
Brooklyn. It stands silent, overlooking the ghosts of Steeplechase Park. Long
since gone, the amusement park that replaced it, and the ones that replace that
are long since past. Nathan’s still dominates its shrinking amusement world.
“From a Hot Dog to a National Habit…..since 1914.” The hot dog teeters on shaky
financial ground. The world is more fat conscious and Nathan’s had its
quintessential American experience of going public with its stock, rising,
franchising and falling into the wreckage of its own dreams and frankfurters.
This is where I took my wife on our first date 38 years past. “Chez
Nathaniels”…where an adjacent diner, standing near us asked if my date was
going to finish her bun.
Turning
back toward Mom’s apartment, I wait for an F train to Caton Avenue, a subway
stop where I would walk down and wait for my Dad coming home from work. He
hasn’t been here for 25 years, but I still smell the Old Spice aftershave as I
photograph at the turnstile….a block and a half and I am looking up to the
sixth floor (6H) where my Mother would rest her elbows on the sill and quietly
watch traffic flowing by, waiting patiently for me to come home. Early dates,
the Dick Clark Show with Rosalind, bowling with Phyllis dinner with Cissy. Mom
would watch from vigilantly from the shadows to avoid appearing overprotective,
anxious. I would wave to the darkness, showing I knew I was worried over and
loved.
When
going on a journey like this, I
love my farsightedness, my astigmatism. It helps me see things the way
they were, rater than the way they are. I celebrate my hearing loss; I don’t
have to listen to the resounding rap that creates sound corridors through the
streets that embraced the days of my childhood.
Finally,
I look down and I am at the manhole cover, home plate for stickball. I pace out
the distance where I once hit two sewer lengths. I run the patterns of football
where plays would be constructed to “go out to the blue Chevy and cut in
front”….A fender here, a bumper here becomes your blockers. The play always
good for ten yards.
When
you travel back to your old neighborhood, take a cheap camera. Taste and smell
your youth. To search too deeply for physicals landmarks is to invite futility.
It is a form of traveling that is mostly internal. To know who you were helps
you appreciate the person that makes the journey now. Trying to “capture”
images the way they existed on film or digitally, with crisp equipment is
senseless. The more detail you capture, the father you are from the truths that
exist only in your mind, in your memory. These truths are real, tangible,
physical and all yours.
You
CAN go home again. It is a journey you have to make alone. And after 50+ years
may I simply say, “Thank you Brooklyn, the heart of the Universe and….I love
you Mom and Dad.”
IF
YOU GO
Staying
Marriott in Brooklyn is too New and too discordant but—
Marriott.com/Brooklyn
Manhattan—
Park South Hotel www.parksouthhotel.com
Chelsea Hotel www.hotelchelsea.com
Trump Hotel www.trumpintl.com
Broadway Bed and Breakfast www.broadway-bed-breakfast.com
Roosevelt Hotel www.theroosevelthotel.com
Hotel Larchmont www.larchmonthotel.com
Eating:
Vincent’s http://02de1be.netsolhost.com/ (Italian Seafood)
Katz’s www.katzdeli.com
Nathan’s Coney Island www.nathansfamous.com