Anyone Carrying a Gun...

As the leaves turn an increasingly vibrant green—in anticipation of the summer doldrums—I cannot help but revisit the past. A past chock-full of utterances by a diverse cast of characters, many of whom are no longer among the living. I’ve included a montage of recent city images with these various expressions that don’t in the least correspond with their meanings, settings, or unique stations in urban lore. Each one of these pronouncements has left an indelible mark on this writer. Obscure and unimportant as they may appear to you, they were repeated over and over—once upon a time—by yours truly and a select few in my life circle. Such remarks, admonitions, and queries celebrate moments in time, bring one back to places that are no more, and venerate the forgotten. Insignificant as the indiscriminate words to follow may seem, they nonetheless live on…right here. Each and every articulation has an absolutely unique, if inconsequential, story to tell.

Anyone carrying a gun, come to the front desk please. Believe it or not when I served on jury duty at the Bronx County Courthouse, there were no metal detectors or security guards at its various entrances. During jury-duty orientation, the above statement was uttered and never failed to get a round of chuckles from perspective jurors. I can assure you that both the times and the orientation have changed.  

The law does not require your job to pay you! And the hits just kept on coming during jury-duty orientation.

That's the cheese! Some forty years ago a rather peculiar fellow complained to George, proprietor of Sam's Pizza, that his slice was burnt. He wanted another one. The request angered George who claimed that the brown hue—the so-called burn—was the natural color of properly cooked mozzarella. Despite being in the right, George gave the pain-in-the neck patron what he desired. 

Take it away! This is what Pat Mitchell—longtime owner of Pat Mitchell's Irish Food Center in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx—exclaimed after completed transactions.

Three papers...um...eh...dollar-five. Pat's brother, Mike, once verbally tallied up a purchase of three Sunday Daily News papers. They were thirty-five cents at the time. My younger brother and I took note and have never forgotten that experience. It's called the Oral Tradition.

You see that bulge in the wall...it's gonna come down some time. One of the strangest and scariest former neighbors—nicknamed "Mr. Fence"—said this about a certain wall near a certain avenue. The man may have been a frightening screwball, but he was right on the mark in this instance.

He hardly said a word at the dinner table. A family lived next-door to Mr. Fence, including a son who was dubbed in those days "retarded." Elderly mother and middle-aged son used to go out shopping every evening at the same time. The latter—overheard—said the above of his father, who evidently wasn't well at the time and not saying much.

I'm having one of the boys come tomorrow morning...but...um...there might be enough for two. There was this unusual doctor in the old neighborhood—a PhD, the only one of his kind—who also happened to have a rare lawn to cut. The above sentiment was uttered in a pre-Caller ID funny phone call. You had to be there to appreciate it.

You done me dirt last week! The very same doctor told my friend Johnny—who had neglected to tell the PhD about running over his electric lawnmower cord the previous week—that he had been wronged. An important life lesson about forthrightness ensued. 

You're as helpless as a rubber stick. A step-father told his spanking new step-son this. Never heard that one again.

Who is it? Living on the top floor of a three-family home regularly necessitated shouting down from atop a staircase to a bell-ringer. A UPS driver named Alex memorably replied, "U...P...S!"

Showers! Remember freshman year in high school? The thought of taking a communal shower after gym class was pretty horrifying. Every now and then, Mr. C, the the Phys Ed teacher, would bellow after class—in the bowels of the malodorous locker room—that dreadful word. Gym teachers obviously derived pleasure from torturing young boys. For I don't recall any shower clarion calls—when we were equally rank—in junior and senior years.

One...two...three...FOUR! Every exercise we did in Phys Ed seemed to be four-count. Mr. C would do the counting and cry an accentuated FOUR when our warm-up exercises were mercifully at an end.

That's eeewie! A trigonometry teacher from that same high school spoke with a pronounced lisp and proclaimed that a certain clamor of thunder—accompanied by a sizzling bolt of lightning—was just that.

Do you want me to tell you out the window! In search of her oldest son—calling his name out a back window—a certain neighbor didn't appreciate his response upon being located. "What?" he cried out.

She worships my husband. A young woman who never knew her father hooked up with a guy who had one among the living. This is how the wife of the extant father described the young woman's relationship with her spouse.

I don't mind the soft ball...but I don't want the goddamn hard ball! I'll call him Padre Pio and he spoke with a thick Italian accent. In those days of yore, we youths played with all kinds of balls in our connected concrete backyards. Pio made it plain what he deemed acceptable and what was not. Not that it mattered to us.

Hey, boys, get out of here. You no belong here. Go in your own place. The old immigrants from back in the day were very territorial and protective of their properties. Same communal concrete backyard as previously mentioned but a different neighbor. Like Padre Pio, though, she did not fully appreciate the good old days when kids were kids and spent much of their free time in the Great Outdoors.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)