The Man We Called Cream Donut

(Originally published 9/30/13)

I don’t exactly know what made me think of the man we once called “Cream Donut” today. I think it happened when I passed by a Dunkin’ Donuts and thought about how expensive their products have become, and how they seem to be getting smaller and airier as the days pass. Cream Donut owned and operated a place called Twin Donut in the Bronx’s Kingsbridge during the 1970s. It was a franchise, I believe, because there were Twin Donuts scattered about the city back then. Actually, there still are handful around, although their numbers have dwindled considerably through the years.

Twin Donut had a large variety of donuts, which was quite impressive in its day. Several stores to its east was a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor, known to many of us as "31 Flavors." I guess what Baskin-Robbins was to ice cream, Twin Donut was to donuts. Where else could you purchase a butternut crunch donut or one with apple filling? My favorites, though, were the more traditional vanilla cream and chocolate cream kinds. Adding to their appeal, I think, was how the shop’s proprietor, an older Greek man, pronounced them—and always in the loudest of tones. “Shaw-Co-Lot cream and Vah-Nella cream!” he’d bellow. As far as my younger brother and I were concerned, his rather unique pronunciations, coupled with the extremely high volume, struck a funny bone.

The pre-caller ID 1970s was also the era of the funny phone call. I know we called Twin Donut a time or two and asked Cream Donut if he had any cream donuts on hand. Of course, we knew the answer was yes. And when he’d answer in the affirmative, we’d ask him what kinds of cream donuts he had. “Shaw-Co-Lot cream and Vah-Nella cream!” he’d roar, even over the telephone. He couldn’t whisper those two words if his life depended on it.

The one thing we never bargained for was an in-the-donut-shop negative experience with Cream Donut himself. One afternoon, my brother and I had ordered several cream donuts—chocolate and vanilla, naturally—and Cream Donut, like a well-schooled Mynah bird, repeated our order just to make certain he got it right. But that enunciation of the two flavors of cream donuts—and decibel level—caused the two of us to temporarily lose it. And while we were desperately trying to get a grip on ourselves, Cream Donut took notice and didn’t like what he saw.

True, Cream Donut had given us a bravura performance that day—we couldn’t have asked for more—but he was an intimidating sort of guy that we really didn’t want to cross. The last thing a couple of innocent youth wanted to do was incur the wrath of this man. But incur his wrath we did. “YOU LAUGHING AT ME?” he angrily queried. We were indeed, but sheepishly said we weren’t. He didn’t believe us but sold us the cream donuts anyway. Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t have blamed the man for pulling a Soup Nazi and saying, “No donuts for you!” Cream Donut was an imposing presence for sure, but a businessman above all else. 

A postscript: Twin Donut served tasty enough donuts but they left an aftertaste that repeated on you throughout the day. And Cream Donut’s little shop at the intersection of Kingsbridge Avenue and W231st Street was notorious for hosting a mice fest every night after lights out.

Ode to the Neighborhood Diner

(Originally published 6/1/10)

At the risk of sounding like a defective CD—harping on casualties of the new millennium and the modern age—I nonetheless feel compelled to put in a good word for my favorite diner and others like it. The cozy neighborhood Greek diners of New York City, including my very own special haunt—once upon a time ubiquitous and thriving institutions in all five boroughs—are on life support.

I am fortunate to still have a snug and welcoming nook to go to when I feel a hankering for bacon, eggs over easy, and home fries for breakfast, or burgers and French fries for lunch. I rarely deviate from my usual when I get there because the usual is a big deal in the diner milieu. It's a comforting constant in a sea-changing world. But here's the real rub: It’s not really about the food, although I must admit that the truly bottomless cup of coffee—and a flavorful and aromatic one at that—is other-worldly.

This holy place that I speak of has been around for decades. The original two Greek giants still loom like Colossus over the dining space. And, yes, like a microcosm of life itself, the diner has had its ups and downs through the years. Its owners, too, have witnessed a mother lode of changes in the neighborhood and, naturally, their clientele as well. The men at grill's edge have watched countless customers grow old and battle all kinds of infirmities. They’ve seen tragedy befall a cross-section of their bread and butter without so much as fair warning. Not too long ago, the diner's alpha male said to me: “When I don’t see people for a while…I worry.” He didn’t see me for a while...and he worried. I fortuitously returned for another act. Others have not been so lucky. Indeed, a fair share of the restaurant’s regulars have quietly slipped away with the passage of time and gone to that Great Greasy Spoon in the Sky. You know the place with its lemon meringue clouds and celestial rivers of rice pudding and Jell-O....

But it's not only the diner’s never-ending story of ravenous patrons—looking for both food and ears to chew on—who are growing old. I had a full head of hair when I ordered my first hamburger there. Its proprietors, too, are not immune to the inexorable and remorseless sands of time. And when they exit center stage for good, this little diner in my hometown, with its old-style hospitality and unique urban ambiance, will sadly go with them. And we will never see their likes again....

The Stickball Boys of Summer...in Autumn

(Originally published 12/4/12)

Last night the Kingsbridge Stickball Boys of Summer gathered together for the first time as a unit in quite a while—a decade or so, I’d say. Ostensibly, it was to commemorate a milestone birthday of mine from several weeks back. Strange, but it doesn’t seem like it was thirty-plus years ago when we were playing stickball games with abandon on the asphalt grounds of John F. Kennedy High School, just a few blocks from where we all called home. We kept copious records of all our exploits—the highlights and lowlights, too. As both the pioneering teenage statistician and contemporary middle-aged man archivist of all our stickball endeavors, I brushed off the cobwebs of the old scorecards that we faithfully kept for several years from the late 1970s through the early 1980s.

In this decidedly different age—simpler times, for sure—I included a “Saying of the Day” option on some of our primitively photocopied scorecards. "Sayings" ranged far and wide from a local pizza man named "George" to controversial and colorful Alabama Governor George Wallace. It seems that one member of our stickball entourage relished mimicking the latter’s distinctive southern drawl. A “Making of the President 1968” documentary, or some such program, aired on PBS at the time, because every single one of us knew where he was coming from when he impersonated Wallace shouting down an unkempt hippie heckler, imploring him to “Geeeeet a heeeeercut.” We were a unique and interesting brood of Bronx stickball players.

Courtesy of a pronounced rooftop clock and digital thermometer on the Exxon gas station just to the north of our playing field, both game-time temperatures—in Fahrenheit—and game durations were recorded for posterity as well. Let the record show that we played in temperatures ranging from forty-five to ninety-nine degrees. On one set of scorecards, I, for some reason, included “Hero” and “Goat” of the game blank spaces. Most of them were, in fact, left blank. Despite occasional unsolicited commentaries on the scorecards that were sometimes caustic and mocking, we generally opted not to underscore and offend individual games’ goats. While were a competitive lot, we had caring hearts, I suppose. And besides, we exchanged teammates from one game to the next. Sure, I scribbled at one point on a scorecard that “RC is a jerk,” and he responded in kind that I was meekly “sweating” under the pressure, but that was all in good fun.

Final season tallies found each and every one of us coming to the plate over one thousand times and pitching more than two hundred innings. Looking back, this heavy workload explains why I was often sore on Cardinal Spellman High School Monday mornings in springtime. There were no stickball spring training sessions for us. When winters turned into springs, we commenced to playing—up to the hilt and end of story.

Ah, but here we were all these years later, in the flesh, and having experienced lives after stickball—physical and emotional odysseys that have taken us a long, long way from the reassuring terra firma of a neighborhood high school with those crude home plate boxes on a graffiti-laden brick wall . Funny, but to a man, we recalled what was—very clearly as a matter a fact—but not so much the intricate details of the three decades that followed and that led us far afield of stickball in the Bronx. Why, exactly, I wanted to "assassinate" my longtime friend RC on a pleasant summer morning when Jimmy Carter was president, I've long since forgotten. I'd hazard a guess I really didn’t want to do that. And although stickball is now a relic of all our pasts—warm and fuzzy memories—we nonetheless continue to play ball with what we've got left in the autumn years.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Zach’s 1250

(Originally published 3/31/19)

I have filed away my yesterday under the “World We Now Know.” Walking along a Manhattan sidewalk and minding my own business, a young woman with a small dog came up alongside of me. She was jabbering away on her phone—a mile a minute—oblivious to one and all in her path. That’s par for the course in 2019, by the way. I heard her say something about a friend’s son who, apparently, scored “only” a 1250 on his SATs. “That’s not such a bad score,” the lady—in a generous mood, I suppose—added.

Now, I doubt such a reassurance would assuage Zach’s mom or, for that matter, Zach. For they both know that a 1250 score is—ipso facto—the kiss of death. Admittance to the most prestigious of prestigious schools just isn’t in the cards. And, let’s face it, status is everything to the status-seekers. 1250 doesn’t buy too many bragging rights. I don’t why, but Lori Loughlin popped into my head at that moment.

A footnote to my encounter with that annoying woman so wrapped up in an annoying personal phone conversation on a hopping city sidewalk: She would, on occasion, acknowledge the fact that she was indeed in the bright light of day. It happened when her little canine friend passed a spritz of urine and then—lo and behold—a couple of marble-sized poops as we used to say. In the immediate aftermath of both the Number One and the Number Two events, the chatty dog walker excitedly exclaimed in a baby-like voice: “Very good!”

After that stimulating experience, I came upon a stretch of sidewalk with scattered white paper plates on it. For the better part of a block, the grounds were littered with them. Each individual plate had the word “God” scrawled—in black magic marker—on it. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I thought. But, then again, everywhere is God’s Country, isn’t it?

Speaking of God’s Country—New York City—police officers with machine guns can now be seen in front of busy entrances. I spied three of them at a Madison Square Garden entry point. As I passed by, another passerby queried one of the cops. She wasn’t wondering why the man had a big gun strapped to his shoulder. She just wanted directions to the Empire State Building. You see that big antenna in the sky. Follow it like the Three Wise Men followed that Bright Star.

It’s the new normal and I’m happy the police presence is there. I just wish they didn’t have to be. I considered taking a close-up image—of the “World We Now Know”—but decided against it. I’ve heard this subway announcement more times than I can count: “Backpacks and other large containers are subject to random searches by the police.” Ditto the street. Pocket cameras, too, are not off limits. The last thing I wanted was the confiscation of my faithful companion.

In the Land Down Under—the subway—my trip commenced at the Van Cortlandt Park terminal, which is above ground. A homeless man with a cane—whom I’ve seen before—greeted me and asked if I could spare some change. I gave him two dollars. He replied, “You made my day!” I hope I really did. On the subsequent ride downtown, a panhandler entered the subway car requesting “food” or “any cash that you could spare.” While he informed the assembled that he was homeless, his approach was all wrong—no detailed back-story and a somewhat intimidating manner. I gave him a dollar and a woman—with her young son—offered him some food. It was a bag containing cut pieces of grapefruit. While he readily accepted my buck, he turned down the fresh fruit. My advice is that if you are going to ask for food or money—because you are hungry and homeless—accept the food as well as the money. It’s better for business.

Another fellow then got on the train who didn’t appear to be homeless. He didn’t ask for anything and sat directly across from me. Before the man uttered a word, I sensed menace afoot. He just looked incredibly angry. The guy also listened in to others’ conversations and muttered aloud various profane responses to them. All the while his eyes threateningly flitted back and forth. They caught mine for one brief second. I quickly turned away. Can’t let that happen again! A family of tourists appeared concerned. Fortuitously, he exited the train after only a few stops. I noticed, though, that his simmering anger accompanied him to the station platform as he seemingly considered his next move, which I thought might be reentering the subway car. When the doors closed and the man was on the other side of them, I was greatly relieved and so were the folks from Dubuque, Iowa.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Waning Agog Factor

(Originally published on August 10, 2014)

Thirty-seven years ago on this day, I was at once in Boston and agog. The adult impresario of this Bronx to Beantown adventure was a neighbor and friend named Richie. My brother Joe and I—two teenagers absent as-yet-invented iPads or flip video cameras—accompanied him to what then seemed like a very faraway and even exotic destination.

While we were out of town the “Son of Sam” was captured. A Boston Globe headline in a sidewalk newspaper machine alerted us that the fiend was in police custody. We were pleasantly surprised when we dropped a dime in the slot and the machine’s front door pulled open, permitting each of us to grab a paper. Evidently, man and boys alike had never purchased one from an inanimate object. I guess we thought it would be dispensed like a bottle of soda or a candy bar. Still, we felt like we were a long way from home when we read the details about this serial killer, a man who had been in our midst during that especially hot summer and the summer before.

We had seen the Red Sox at Fenway Park the night before and also peed in a communal urinal there, which was yet another first for us. I sat beside a gangly grandfather and his grandson, I surmised, because the latter called the former “Pops.” Pops was pretty old and, when nature called, had more than a little difficulty navigating the ballpark’s steep steps and cramped aisles. He was a dead ringer for Our Gang's Old Cap. The Red Sox beat the Angels 11-10 that night in a back and forth slugfest. The Globe deemed it one of the most exciting games ever played. Richie, however, noted how “dilapidated” the environs were, and obviously liked the sound of the word, branding countless Boston edifices and nearby locales with the same unflattering moniker.

Dilapidated or not, the three of us were generally agog throughout the trip, blissfully going about the business of exploring foreign terrain before anything called e-mail or Twitter existed. Joe had a hand-me-down, fold-up camera with him that took blurry pictures. Richie wore a strap around his neck attached to an over-sized instant camera during our sightseeing. His photos developed a bit on the green side, including shots at Harvard University and of the Charles River. No flash meant no pictures could be taken of the Green Monster by night. On our way home, we naturally couldn’t pass up America’s most historical rock in Plymouth. This rather pedestrian boulder had at some point cracked in two and been cemented together—not a particularly compelling visual and even less so in shades of instant-picture green.

There were no digital cameras or iPhones in existence, so thus no capacity to post our pictures on Facebook, which wasn’t around either. We were merely content with being agog as we climbed the Bunker Hill Monument and toured Old Ironsides. The dilapidated surroundings all around us actually astounded us. We called home from pay phones. In the present age of instant gratification, with all too many people engrossed in their Blackberries or some such technological device—and walking the streets like oblivious automatons—I fear that the Agog Factor just ain't what it used to be…can’t be what it used to be…and that’s really kind of sad.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Who Took the Clown Pictures Down?

(Originally published on 4/4/13)

Many years ago, in a neighbor’s basement—a magical basement, I daresay—the walls were adorned with images of clowns. One was a standard print of the morose-faced Emmett Kelly, but the others in the ensemble were very different. They were not paintings per se, but made of some kind of colorful synthetic chips—rough to the touch and uniquely 1960s looking.

As a boy, I loved visiting this basement just up the street. It had a bar, too, on the premises, which was loaded with adult beverages and assorted bric-a-brac and memorabilia. The latter was of more interest to me. I recall the basement’s matriarch opening up a thirty-two-ounce aluminum can of Hi-C, pouring it into a sixty-four-ounce plastic pitcher, and filling the remainder up with tap water and a full tray of ice on top of that. I’d never before witnessed the watering down of a Hi-C drink, but it wasn’t half-bad. It was the power of the clown pictures, perhaps, that made everything in the basement look and taste good.

Indeed, nobody cared that the family cat slept on the dinner table and everywhere else for that matter. It was the basement after all. And the cat was yet another intriguing basement player. It was the only housecat without a name. The neighbors across the alleyway had a cat named “Sniffles.” Maybe “Cat” was actually the cat’s name. It remains a mystery to this day. Cat could often be spotted on a perch in the basement’s front window. One chilly afternoon an interior window in the basement was shut with Cat in between it and the exterior one. The family went on a frantic search throughout the neighborhood for Cat, when all the time he was resting comfortably on his favorite roost in the front window.

Like so many other things in life, the basement as I once knew it is no more. Cat is no longer roaming the place, nor are their clown pictures on its walls. The fashionable contact paper that was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s, and that was supposed to resemble wood paneling, has, too, been stripped away. However, the memories linger.

There was a man named Lou who rented the basement resident’s garage. He used to thank basement son Richard—profusely as a matter of fact—for opening the garage for him when fate brought the two of them together. “Sank you, Reeechard!” he’d say both loudly and sincerely. He spoke with some sort of accent, which I enjoyed mimicking as a young teen. It was okay to do that kind of thing back then. In fact for a spell, I must have uttered, “Sank you, Reeechard!” a few hundred times. Then one day, I decided to put some words into Lou’s limited lexicon—ones I had never heard him utter.

“Reeechard, who took the clown pictures down?” I asked. And so, with Reechard’s blessing, we snapped a photograph of a clown picture being taken down—by the devil no less. But it was not in our youthful, living-in-the-moment brains to press the fast-forward button and contemplate that the clown pictures were not, in fact, eternal and would one day come down. Perhaps they’re hanging up in other people’s homes as I write these words. I'd like to think so. Maybe, though, they weren’t thought as worth saving and put out with the trash. Such is the duality of life and everything that we value.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Memories...and Unsolved Mysteries

(Originally published 9/29/11)

When I was young boy of about six or seven years of age, I accompanied my parents to a party thrown in my father’s honor in the Marble Hill section of Manhattan, just a few blocks away from our home: Kingsbridge in the Bronx. Quirky geographical changes through the years have led to some confusion. It's part of Manhattan but not part of Manhattan Island, but—once upon a time—it was.

As I recall, Mr. and Mrs. L—the hosts of this get-together—were genial enough. The man of the house once ran a successful bar business in the big city, and his Misses—I subsequently learned as an adult—was both his second wife and his niece. Anyway, reminiscences from such a tender age are typically confined to disjointed snippets from a wide-eyed kid’s unique perspective—of moments good and bad; important and unimportant.

As I saw it from my six- or seven-year-old eyes, the L’s house was located in an incredibly atmospheric sliver of geography. It lorded over a piece of real estate everybody knew back then as "Shanty Town," a neighborhood with rows of old houses and some shacks, too—relics from a hardscrabble past. Hoovervilles. Some of Shanty Town’s residents raised chickens in coops, and even farm animals, in their front and backyards. But I was also a guest in a home not too far from a busy railroad, the Harlem River Ship Canal, and the elevated subway tracks of the Number 1 train. There was an intoxicating ambiance surrounding the L’s humble abode, with sounds emanating from nearby trains and boats. But beyond these rather general memories of welcome sensory sensations, I can remember only one concrete detail surrounding this Marble Hill experience of mine.

Mrs. L, the lady of the house, spoke in a throaty, Betty Davis-esque voice from—I’ve since concluded—one too many Marlboro's and an unquenchable thirst for the grape. She was pleasant enough on the surface, but—from my little boy’s view of the world—there was something of the night about her. She was quite petite, always wore bright red lipstick, and looked by day a little too much like the Joker from Batman—as played by Cesar Romero—for me to fully warm to her. By night, it got somewhat worse, and she resembled a vampire, which I know is rather hip now, but it wasn’t back then.

Here now is my only definitive memory of being in that house more than forty years ago. Mrs. L very graciously gave the youngsters on the scene free run of the place. She asked only one thing of us—that we keep our distance from an automobile tire flatly resting atop the stairs in her two-story home. I admit to being fascinated by this car tire in a spot where car tires weren’t usually found.

Flash forward three decades and I recounted this peculiar memory, so etched in mind, to a friend of mine. He said, “That’s probably where she kept her stash.” While it does make some sense that a person might conceal his or her bottles of whiskey in a car tire—if secrecy is the name of the game—it seems rather illogical to do so in a tire sitting at the top of a staircase, where the logical question passersby would pose is: “What’s a car tire doing there?” But that's as good an explanation as any that I've heard before or since. Memories…and unsolved mysteries.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

This Old House

(Originally published 7/30/17)

This old house is no more. It stood in the same location in the Bronx for nearly a century and, it’s fair to say, witnessed innumerable and seismic changes all around it. If this old house could only have spoken before it was demolished, it would have had a story to tell. The home’s original owner built the structure with his own two hands, which wasn’t unheard of in the Bronx of yesteryear. People who had the privilege of entering its interior reported that the rooms were tiny and the ceilings, low. It was a dwelling for a different time and place. Pat Mitchell, an iconic local grocer for decades, rented a furnished room in the house’s attic in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While an average-sized adult couldn’t stand up straight there, rooms were really hard to come by then.

I am old enough to remember the builder’s then-elderly daughter living in the house with her grown son, known as “Buddy.” Buddy, who bore a striking resemblance to actor Jason Robards, had a faithful German shepherd often at his side. He was not what you would call a conversationalist. Outside of walking his dog or silently lounging around in his windowed front porch with a can of beer in his hand, the man was rather nondescript. The neighborhood’s nastier wagging tongues considered Buddy something of a slacker. He never appeared to be duly employed and was never sans beer money—a deadly one-two punch as far as they were concerned. And, too, the family had a summer place in the Catskills, where Buddy and his mother vacationed and eventually moved to after selling this old house.

Interestingly, the house's foundation was laid atop the recently covered-over Tibbetts Brook, which meandered through this area of the Bronx until the fledgling years of the twentieth century. When it was first ready for occupancy, there were still vestiges of the stream at the surface. Initially, the home's owner had a swimming hole in the backyard—water in which he actually swam, or at least wallowed in. The basement was quite often flooded.

When my grandparents moved to Kingsbridge in 1946, the old man's wife was still among the living. There were many empty lots in the neighborhood at that time and locals planted what they called “victory gardens” in some of them, even after the war and victory. My grandfather tilled a plot in close proximity of this old house. Approximately ten years later, he and fellow gardeners were asked to vacate the premises in the name of progress. The original developer of the property—directly behind this old house—went bankrupt after running into unforeseen and considerable water issues courtesy of the underground, but ever-tenacious Tibbetts Brook seeking daylight. Two tall buildings were subsequently erected, which were dubbed Tibbett Towers. And this old house now had a parking lot alongside it.

Happily, my grandfather and a few friends found a new site in which to indulge their penchant for gardening. It was not too far from their old garden space—walking distance in fact—and just to the north of this old house. A makeshift fence promptly enclosed the new space, and a well was dug that tapped into Tibbetts Brooks, which supplied the flowers and crops with a regular and generous source of water. It was this garden that I came to know during my youth, before it, too, was plowed under. I recently learned that the old man who built this old house planted the Sycamore tree in the backyard, which has long towered over the property. As of this writing, it’s still there and probably over eighty years old. No surprise though: the developer is going to cut it down—in the name of progress, naturally.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

With Mr. Denton on Doomsday

On more than one occasion, I have witnessed a passing car sporting the vanity license plate: DOOMSDAY. Ordinarily, it would have gone by unnoticed—just one among many vehicles traveling up and down the street where I live. But this automobile’s driver craved attention with his ear-splitting display of four-wheel barbarism. A ridiculously loud and revving engine with popping gunshot sounds doesn’t exactly complement one’s morning coffee and is no more pleasing at lunch or dinnertime. It’s off-putting morning, noon, and night, which, I suppose, is the point.

Doomsday it is. At least that’s the way it feels around here with the countless speed racers violating multiple New York City ordinances as they make their daily rounds. Then there are all those noisy electric scooters and their various epigones—many of them illegal and often operated by illegals—whizzing past stop signs and through red lights. Further adding to Doomsday is the $4.4 billion retail crime spree underway in the Big Apple. Every damn thing is locked up in stores because the thieves know they won’t ever be. There is this palpable sense of chaos and lawlessness run amok, which I’ve never experienced before—at this omnipresent level anyway. Local politicians appear uninterested in the problems or unwilling to address them in any meaningful way.

I have an idea. In the Batman TV series, starring the indomitable Adam West, I recall an episode where the Joker captured Batman and Robin in a large fish net. Why don’t the big retailers that are being robbed blind place big nets by their entrances and exits and snare the shoplifters on their way out? Then lift them up in the air and encourage the non-criminal patrons to taunt them and, if available, toss rotten fruit at them. When all is said and done, ship the offenders en masse to an undisclosed wilderness location equipped, of course, with survival kits donated by Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot. Sounds like a plan, no?

Moving on to our national dignity crisis—self-respect sacrificed on the altar of ridiculousness and obeisance to unworthy people. As a youth, I had a poster on my bedroom wall with this Native American proverb: “To give dignity to man is above all else.” Sadly, a vastly different kind of tribal mentality has descended on much of the populace, particularly those who are addicted to social media and can’t get enough of bloviating talking heads, sky-is-falling commentators, and loony conspiracists. The ones, too, who also vote in primaries and supply us with the worst general-election candidates imaginable.

In fact, their names are legion—men and women who have cast dignity away to kiss Trump’s keister come hell or high water. Exhibit A: Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee. And on Side B: the minions who have been telling us that old Joe Biden was sharp as a tack—better than ever in fact—when are eyes, ears, and common sense told us otherwise. The best president since FDR—come on, man! It’s retirement village time, they now say. It takes a village, I guess.

Several months ago, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion column entitled, “Age Matters. Which Is Why Biden’s Age is his Superpower.” Around the same time, the New York Times ran the piece, “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style.” You can’t make this stuff up. Did these authors actually believe what they were saying? If they did, they ought to find another line of work. Self-respect takes yet another back seat in 2024.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump repeatedly proves that he is meshuggeneh. His tweets, or whatever they are now called, are creepy crazy and certifiably looney tunes. I have little doubt the man, too, is suffering from cognitive decline, but it is hard to decipher in an individual who is bona fide fruit loops. Permit me now to turn my attention elsewhere—to an alternative to the two, manifestly unfit for the presidency, geriatrics. A third-party candidate. This option has had a worm devour part of his brain and—heaving a sigh of relief here—sampled barbecued goat and not barbecued dog cooked on a spit in Patagonia. “So many skeletons in my closet,” the man says. Now, I will concede, that’s quite an honest admission, but hardly refreshingly so.

In closing, there’s an old Kamalan proverb worth mentioning: “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” Yes, then, I will just sit back and recall the better and saner days when Michael Dukakis was the Democratic presidential nominee and selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate—two reasonable adults from a more reasonable and dignified time. I remember voting for them with pride at having done my civic duty. I wish that time were every day, but it’s not. See all of the above.

The Summers of Love

(Originally published 6/17/10)

Gaelic Park in the Bronx's Kingsbridge is a neighborhood institution. Bordering West 240th Street on its south side, it is now owned and operated by my alma mater, Manhattan College. The grassy expanse hosts college related as well as outside sporting events. It is an atmospheric piece of green, too, with a busy Number 1 subway train yard for a backdrop.

During my youth in the early 1970s, this snippet of terra firma hosted summertime rock concerts that attracted people from near and far. There were more than a few famous names who performed in Gaelic Park, but I was too young to know or to care. On those memorable summer nights, the back streets, including my very own, became clogged with too many cars in search of too few parking spaces. While neighbors sniffed at their overt violation of protocol, the Esposito family leased the available space in their concrete backyard for a welcome sum of money in what were hyper-inflationary times.

Locals of all ages sat transfixed on their front stoops, watching the recurring spectacles of not how many clowns could fit into the automobiles parking all around them, but how many hippies would pile out of them. A parade of peculiar looking sorts marched past us on their way to Gaelic Park. As I recall, neighbors debated the gender of many of the passersby. Other than the scraggly bearded, who were presumed to be the male species, the clean-shaven hippies with the long, scraggly hairdos often appeared as gender neutral as they were generally unwashed.

It’s a safe bet that these "flower children," who are now Medicare recipients, were looking with similar wary eyes at the urban ethnics passing judgment on them from the steps of their stoops, and on beach chairs on the sidewalks. They didn’t trust anyone over thirty—and the Bronx stoop-sitting brigades were as untrustworthy as they came.

Despite the peculiar smell that wafted up the stoop steps and into the sultry season’s open windows, and which seemed to linger especially long in the city’s muggy ozone, the species of hippie on parade were more Jim Henson than Weathermen. Except for a couple of guys relieving themselves against Mrs. Covello’s maple tree, the attendees came and went peacefully. The country at large may have been in turmoil, but these were the summers of love and tie-dye shirts, not iPods and iPhones.

Happy Junior Fence Day

(Originally published on June 28, 2016)

Today is Junior Fence Day. It is indeed and has been since I recorded the date on a piece of loose-leaf paper chronicling the noteworthy events of 1978’s spring and summer. On that June 28th—a Wednesday by the way—I found myself reading the novel Jaws 2 at a front window overlooking the sidewalk below. I spied two youths—who shall remain nameless—run past and didn't give it a second thought, because in those days kids played outside all the time and did a lot of running. However, several seconds later, I saw a fellow whom we knew as “Junior Fence”—son of "Mr. Fence"—race by. This running game assumed new meaning now because the boy and girl in question were thirteen and ten, respectively, and Junior Fence was a grown man in his twenties. He was a scary dude, too, with—the preponderance of the evidence concluded—a serious drug and/or alcohol problem.

I subsequently uncovered the whole truth and nothing but the truth concerning the “Great Chase.” The two youngsters had been tossing rocks atop the Fence family back porch awning, which was made of aluminum. One stone, apparently, missed its intended mark and crashed through a glass door leading into the Fence family kitchen. And the fleet-footed Junior Fence was out for blood—for justice—in a New York minute. The boy in question laid low for a while because the Fences were vigilantly on the prowl for the guilty party or parties. The little girl had been promptly exonerated when her father told Junior Fence in no uncertain terms that she was a good girl and to bug off. Fortuitously for the boy, his family went on vacation for a couple of weeks beginning on July 1st. By the time he returned to the neighborhood, the manhunt had pretty much been called off and life returned to normal.

While making my appointed rounds today, June 28, 2016, I was reminded of Junior Fence Day when a car pulled up alongside me and an angry young man got out. Coincidentally, he wanted to know if I had seen a couple of kids run past me. Evidently, they had thrown an egg at his car in the vicinity of Ewen Park, which isn’t very far from where the Junior Fence incident went down. He pointed out the splatter as Exhibit A and said he was after the juvenile delinquents. I hadn’t seen them, but a couple seated on a nearby bench had and told him as much. Like Junior Fence thirty-eight years earlier, he was hopping mad and intent on exacting justice the old-fashioned way.

Returning home after this encounter on this solemn day, I passed a couple of school kids—a boy and a girl—and overheard a snippet of their conversation. Girl to boy: “Genesis don’t like you no more because she thinks you like Chase.” Why would anybody name a kid after a bank? Let there be light on this Junior Fence Day.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

June Swoon

(Originally published 6/27/18)

I've written in the past about a man from the old neighborhood whom I aptly nicknamed "Mr. Fence." The moniker stuck and endured through the years. This date on the calendar calls to mind both the man and the legend. The summers of "Mr. Fence" were simpler ones as kids one and all—sans any electronic devices to occupy their time—frolicked with abandon in the great outdoors. This fact of life made Mr. Fence—a peculiar, sometimes scary, and very private individual—a perpetual fence mender and steadfast sentry. But that was then and this is now.

Apparently, this is what happens when the Donner party makes a reservation. In fact, I googled said party and encountered the "People also ask" questions and answers, which included: "Who was eaten in the Donner party?"

For three of my four years in high school, I had Mr. Cipolla as a gym teacher. To commence each class, the man would put his students through a tired litany of four-count warm-up exercises. "One, two, three, four...one, two, three, four...one, two, three, four," he'd repeatedly intone. The exercises were over and done with when the final "four" was shouted as such: "FOUR!!!"

Playing the familiar Mr. Softee jingle—illegally appropriated—I was left to wonder how this mysterious and shady ice cream peddler could sleep at night.

Meanwhile, Jolly Joe—with the most god-awful jingle—peddles his fare in the bright light of day. 

A bona fide heat wave—with ample doses of oppressive humidity—is in the offing for the Fourth of July week.

The wacky world we now live in necessitates concrete barriers at busy New York City street corners with bicycle paths. Why? So deranged individuals don't purposely plow down bicyclists.

The best bargain in New York City: the Staten Island Ferry. The twenty-five minute trip from Manhattan to Staten Island—and vice versa—is free of charge and comes with incredible views. 

On seeing what I believed was a faux paddle steamer in New York Harbor, I thought of Robert Fulton who invented something else: the steamboat. Once upon a time that sort of thing was taught in school.

As New York City becomes more gentrified and businesses cater to hipsters, longstanding diner sides like canned corn niblets aren't always on the menu. For a vegetable side, a greasy spoon very familiar to me now offers only a sautéed or grilled medley that includes broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, peppers, and zucchini. I'll take a traditional diner's bland and tasteless peas/carrots over that concoction.

At the Van Cortlandt Park terminal...I think not.

Straphanger philosopher or Mel Brooks fan?

"I dare you to knock this off" subway sleeper...

When the repeated subway station announcement—"A train is approaching the station. Please stand away from the platform"—assumes a higher meaning.

Target practice in the land down under?

If I had a hammer, I'd imagine George Costanza above me...

The next stop...the Twilight Zone...

"Who is Number One?"

The law of the New York City jungle permits dogs on the subway provided they are in carriers. Also, canine companions must not "annoy" fellow passengers. It's too bad this edict doesn't apply to the human animal, who is much more likely to annoy his or her fellow riders. On a recent journey of mine, a husband and wife entered my subway car with their four children. The kids promptly turned the setting into a playground while their parents—oblivious to the extremely annoying behavior—sat idly by as if they were in their own backyard.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Say Hey, Derek Jeter

(Originally published 9/16/14)

I read in yesterday’s Daily News that soon to be ex-ballplayer—and future Hall of Famer—Derek Jeter has gotten his very own publishing imprint with Simon & Schuster. It’s very imaginatively called “Jeter Publishing” and the first book sporting said brand is a children’s novel, “The Contract,” by none other than Derek Jeter and, of course, his ghostwriter, Paul Mantell. The novel’s chief protagonist is a boy named Derek Jeter, who gives it his all on the baseball field, always plays fair, and respects his family, friends, and teammates. The book will no doubt further cement the angelic aura of Derek Jeter. After all, he’s an athlete who played his entire baseball career with the same team—the New York Yankees—and has never been embroiled in any scandal or suspected of cheating like so many of his peers.

Full disclosure: I grew up a rabid Met fan in a Bronx neighborhood of mostly Yankee fans, including my father, who lived and died with his team. Through his power of example, he taught me from an early age that being a New York City baseball fan absolutely precluded double dipping. That is, a bona fide fan could not possibly root for both the Mets and the Yankees. It was inorganic. In fact, diehard fans—as both he and I were—loathed with heartfelt passion our cross-town rivals. And so, even all these years later—with my father no longer among the living and my baseball ardor gone with the passage of time—I haven’t fully divested myself of that strong distaste for the Yankees. I never, therefore, partook in Derek Jeter worship.

Nevertheless, I was curious to see what he would say on Derek Jeter Day at Yankee Stadium. With his retirement at the end of this season, I imagined it would be an emotional farewell—saying goodbye to the fans after twenty years in the same uniform and in the same town. I vividly recalled Willie Mays Night at Shea Stadium on September 25, 1973. After floundering for much of the year, the Mets were in an improbable and excitingly competitive pennant chase, and Willie had announced his retirement at the end of the season. Willie Mays—who had been brought back to New York to finish his career where it all began—spoke from the heart that night with tears in his eyes. The poignancy of the moment was overwhelming for young and old alike. I wasn’t yet eleven and had tears in my eyes, too. Willie—the “Say Hey, Kid”—was an icon. And while it was sad to see him go, it was all too evident that age had caught up to him and eroded, beyond repair, his formerly spectacular skills. He was forty-two but fittingly exiting the baseball scene on a team that would make it all the way to the seventh game of the World Series.

 

Yes, I expected at least a little poignancy in Derek Jeter’s parting salvo but found his speech to the fans cliché-laden and devoid of any real emotion. It got me wondering if it was just Derek Jeter’s way, or maybe that the absence of any Mays-like poignancy was a reflection of the times. Mays played in his first major league baseball game in 1951, just four years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier. It wasn’t a cakewalk for him in those early days, nor was Willie raking in millions of dollars. Willie Mays played stickball on the streets of New York with neighborhood kids. And when the Mets honored him that September night, a pedestrian banquet table was set up on the field with gifts aplenty on top of it for the retiring legend. Today’s game is so awash in money and glitz that it cannot help but negatively impact even the retirement of a baseball great like Derek Jeter, whose last contract was for $60 million over four years (a pay cut, too). Willie Mays's journey through baseball was a storied one, and when he remarked in his farewell, “There always comes a time for somebody to get out,” it was not only true but palpably sad as well. So sad because somehow, we knew we would never see his likes again—and we haven’t. The times just won’t allow it.

The Same Non-Excuse

(Originally published 8/16/11)

In my recent college alumni newspaper, I sadly learned that a professor of mine had passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-five. He taught philosophy. And while I wouldn’t rank him as a personal favorite of mine, or an inspirational figure in my young life, he deserves his due as a memorable character in my book.

I had originally taken a course called “Logic” with Professor R, which for some inexplicable reason was mandatory for business students back then. Really, it was the most illogical course I had ever sat through and was happy with my “C” grade. Always dressed in flannel shirts and high-water polyester slacks, I considered my instructor a classic higher-education eccentric. True, he was also somewhat haughty, as he mostly lectured to the ceiling tiles, but nonetheless had remarkable peripheral vision and somehow always noticed raised hands, even with his eyes glued to the heavens. But considering the heavy workload in other courses, his rambling approach, no reliance on a textbook (although we purchased one), and no homework assignments, were something of a welcome palliative. And so, I took my chances with him again in an elective course called “Introduction to Philosophy.”

The icing on the cake for me was that it was offered in a twice-a-week package, rather than the general three days of fifty-five-minute classes. Granted, they were at 2:30 in the afternoon and wouldn’t end until 4:15, but the two-day thing, and potential light workload, was worth the risk. It paid off in spades, and we weren’t even required to purchase a textbook this time. But herein lies the unforgettable qualities of Professor R. At that time of the school day, a one hour and forty-five-minute lecture from a monotonous fellow on the tedious subject of philosophy was a Sominex recipe. Classroom sleepers were omnipresent. I remember looking around at my classmates and spotting countless glazed-over eyes, with some of my peers in the soundest of sleeps. I regularly fought off the urge, but there was one time where I could not account for twenty-five minutes of the day. Frightening. It was a Professor R blackout.

Then one day our professor was late for class. I doubt very much it was official school policy, but we students worked with a ten-minute rule. If one of our profs didn’t show up within that allotted time, we were free to go—and we did. Something or another brought me back to the scene of the crime, and I encountered Professor R coming down the hall. Thinking quickly on my feet for a college student, I played dumb and posed this question to him: “No class today?” He answered me with a long-winded account about how he was engaged in some uber-philosophical discussion with a colleague and—before he knew it—had completely lost track of the time.

“Why are you late?” he then asked, catching me off guard. There was no more quick thinking on my part as I stammered a reply of how I was, ipso facto, just late. Professor R then uttered the unforgettable line for which he has forever a warm place in my heart. “I guess we both have the same non-excuse,” the man said. He also seemed genuinely peeved we had all run out on him like we did, and that now his carefully honed lesson plan was all screwed up. “You tell them…” he said—as if I would see “them” en masse—that he would have to accelerate and consolidate his remaining lectures to cover the requisite materials before the final exam. Most of his students would have been surprised to learn, I think, that he actually had a semester’s lesson plan, but, evidently, from where he sat staring at the ceiling, he did.

Finally, I am left with the image of Professor R entering the classroom in his patented rapid and detached sort of way, only to encounter a large coffee urn and several trays of donuts alongside his desk, left over from a previous something or another. Some college kid from across the hall looked in and, pointing to the donuts, asked, “Can I take one of them?” In his inimitable and erudite manner, Professor R replied, “They’re not mine to give.” The kid took that as a yes and grabbed one, stuffed it in his mouth, then a couple of more, and went on his merry way.

The Hot Dog Lady and Hot Dogs

Once upon a time, I announced, “I bought a hot dog from the Hot Dog Lady.” To be more precise: Forty plus years ago, when the “Hot Dog Lady,” as she was affectionately known, plied her trade on Broadway, often in the vicinity of the neighborhood OTB—Off-Track Betting for those who have forgotten. Every now and then, I treated myself to a plain Sabrett frankfurter—no mustard, onions, or sauerkraut—plucked from her wagon’s well of “dirty water.” 

The Hot Dog Lady endured for quite a while, part of the local fabric for years. A tall, lanky, intense-looking young fellow manned the cart from time to time. I often wondered if he was the Hot Dog Lady’s son—a chip off the old block. There was always something menacing about the guy, though. But, then again, he had big shoes to fill. Nowadays, there are vendors aplenty on the Hot Dog Lady’s former turf—and not one is peddling frankfurters.

A news story I read today inspired this curious trip down memory lane. It cataloged the hot dog prices at America’s various ballparks. A frank at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, costs $7.19, I learned. A peculiar price tag, no? I couldn’t imagine the vendor patrolling the now defunct Shea Stadium in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and repeatedly hollering “Hey, hot dog!”—making change on that.

There was nothing like a hot dog at a baseball game. When I was a fan, the official hot dog of the Mets varied from year to year. Interchangeably delicious in that sporting milieu, I remember Schickhaus, Tobin’s, and Kahn’s. brands.  A friend of mine brought packs of Tobin’s—purchased at Duffy’s, a local butcher—to our backyard barbecues in the mid-1980s. Yes, the hot dog is a peculiar beast, incredibly alluring in many settings and remarkably gross in others.

While barbecued wieners typically kick franks up a notch, I do recall a dog of dogs from a past brand called Plymouth Rock. How could such an iconic name for such an iconic food staple have been so bad, you ask, that even a charcoal fire couldn’t save? I don’t know, but the hot dogs were nasty. Their ghastly gray appearance and one picture is worth a thousand words taste left an indelible mark. The Plymouth Rock hot dog brand is extinct, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me. Happily, the Rock remains.

The hot dog has long mattered. It sustained me throughout high school and is among my fondest memories of my secondary education. The cafeteria featured Monday through Friday specials, along with a daily frankfurter alternative. They were thirty-five cents when I commenced high school and fifty cents when I graduated. The hot dogs maintained their delectableness from beginning to end.

“How much is that dog in the window?” I wondered once upon a time. Riviera Pizza had added frankfurters to its menu. My favorite pizza place up the block, Sam’s, had no such option. The franks rested on a griddle in the front window and cast an enticing aroma to passersby. I purchased a couple once at fifty cents a pop. Tasty! At around the same time, my family’s automobile excursions to visit the maternal grandparents brought us past a place called Hot Dog Johnny’s in Buttzville, New Jersey. While Dad wasn’t inclined to stop, he eventually relented. The hot dogs were nothing to write home about—deep-fried and shriveled looking—but the ambience was second to none.

Lastly, in 1978, the Mets acquired a player named Willie Montanez, who was considered a “hot dog” in those days. His on-the-field antics, including a unique homerun trot, were the exception to the baseball rule. But Willie was our hot dog and we relished him for one brief shining moment. The hot dogs are the rule in present-day baseball, but they, somehow, have lost their appeal. It’s a hot dog thing…