Success and the Shopkeeper...

(Originally published on 7/9/2011)

Several years ago—in the wrong place at the wrong time—I was in earshot of an elderly woman named Catherine as she ruminated on her life and times. Catherine was knocking on eighty and had raised three children—two sons and a daughter. In Catherine’s humble estimation, her daughter passed muster in the game of life. She married a good provider and supplied her mother with a healthy parcel of grandchildren. Her oldest son did all right, too. Straight out of college, he took a good job with good benefits, married, furnished mom with grandkids, and never looked back.

It was the middle child, Robbie, who didn’t quite live up to his mother’s expectations of the way things ought to be, despite having added to her ample brood of grandchildren. Robbie made more money than his two siblings combined—a lot more—but this didn’t earn him any extra credit as far as old mama was concerned, which was kind of strange. Money equals success from the perspectives of an awful lot of people, and Catherine was fixated on dollars and cents, even though her senior citizen savings were closing in on seven figures. Her husband had been both a good provider and a good investor, yet she still watered down the Hawaiian Punch in grave fear that she might one day end up in the poor house.

Robbie, in fact, made more dough than anybody on the family tree, which could be traced back to hardworking fishermen on the southern coast of Italy. In his mother’s worldview, Robbie’s unpardonable sin was that he made all of his moolah—millions—in a rather grungy retail environment. In other words, he didn’t wear a suit and tie to work every day, and didn’t have a benefits package bestowed on him by some benevolent corporate benefactor like GE, the Bank of America, or Proctor & Gamble. Catherine relished passing on up-to-the-minute employment reports on her relations—once, twice, and thrice removed, it didn’t matter. From where she sat, there was nothing that commanded more awe and respect than working for a “big company,” wearing neatly pressed dress clothes, and, of course, putting in very long hours for a familiar corporate master.

That her son founded a business on his own that eventually employed hundreds of people didn’t impress her in the least. Looking back on all that was, she wistfully remarked, “Robbie is content to be a shopkeeper.” And then added as a parenthetical aside: “He had a really good job, too, at Gimbel's when he got out of college. He could have gone places there had he stayed with them.” Upon graduation, Robbie had managed this Manhattan department store’s kitchen appliance section. He wore a suit and tie to work and—the icing on the cake from mama’s catbird seat—schlepped on the subway to the job day after day after day. It doesn’t get any better than that. “He could have gotten three weeks vacation had he stayed there for five years,” Catherine recalled almost four decades later. True, multi-millionaire Robbie could have one day become the CEO of Gimbel's—all things are possible, I suppose—just in time for the department store chain to declare bankruptcy and take all their generous employee benefit packages with them.

So, you must be wondering by now: What exactly is the meaning of this life parable? What exactly is the meaning of success? Well, I just don’t know. But Catherine apparently knew and, for starters—just starters—shopkeepers all were a bunch of losers.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stickball Bat

(Originally published on 6/10/11)

Stickball has been called the “poor man’s baseball.” An urban game largely associated with the streets of New York and some of its gritty metropolitan neighbors, like Jersey City, it’s the stuff of legend. Believed to have initially taken flight in the early 1920s, stickball was played on the streets with a broom handle and a rubber ball colloquially known as a “spaldeen.” Manhole covers served as bases and key game markers.

But like virtually every city street game from the past, stickball sightings are pretty rare these days. I can honestly say that my generation was the last to play it faithfully and informally in neighborhood after neighborhood—and in various incarnations, too—throughout the spring and summer months. My father and his friends played countless stickball games in the 1940s and 1950s on the local streets of Kingsbridge in the Bronx. In sharp contrast with today's mega-congestion, the streets were then lightly trafficked with very few parked cars to get in the way. From the photographic evidence in my possession, guys sometimes sported dress clothes and dress shoes while taking their cuts and sprinting around from sewer to sewer. Apparently, there was no such thing as going home and changing into more appropriate attire after work. It was play ball. And, also, people dressed up and stayed dressed up on Sundays back then, stickball game or not.

By the time I came of stickball age, games were still played on the streets. But slowly but surely, a newer stickball incarnation took hold. It involved fast-pitching against a wall with a spray painted or, as we more law-abiding youth employed, a chalk-outlined—and eventually even masking-taped—strike-zone box.

The combined one-two punch of youthful love of the game and corresponding lack of disposable income inspired us, on occasion, to fish the neighborhood sewers for spaldeens—the ones that got away. Spaldeens on the streets were ubiquitous during my boyhood in the 1960s and 1970s, and used for a variety of purposes. Naturally, a fair share of them inevitably found their ways into the four corner sewers at intersecting streets. Were it not for a long-handled fish net, these landings might have been the spaldeens' final-resting places. Admittedly, the balls were foul-smelling and quite grimy to touch after we plucked them out of the sewers' putrid muck, and only marginally improved after we thoroughly hosed them down. Hand sanitizers would have come in handy in a time before hand sanitizers.

We eventually switched to tennis balls as our preferred stickball orbs, but Bill Jr. of Bill’s Friendly Spot, a local candy store, chastised us when we returned broken bats bought from him. “How many times do I have to tell you guys!" he said. "You can’t use tennis balls with them!” The price we paid for purchasing stickball bats solely for their coolly painted yellows, reds, and blues were lectures from a cantankerous shopkeeper and no refunds to boot.

We once thought we had solved our stickball bat dilemma for all time with an aluminum broom handle taken from my mother’s mop. However, that thing was dinged, dented, and irreparably distorted in very short order. We likewise surmised that a super-thick wooden flagpole was a stickball bat godsend, but it, too, just wasn't up to the task. Shattering after only a couple of innings of play, the pole’s visible thickness evidently didn’t equate with its denseness. And one neighbor family was without a flagpole.

Eventually, a friend and stickball devotee discovered a very strong broom handle—as lean and mean as they came—at his family’s fish store. Our bat problems were forevermore solved—through, in fact, the very last game we played at nearby John F. Kennedy High School, the ideal locale for a stickball game. As is so often the case with so many things in life, we didn't realize at the time that our very last stickball game would be our very last—and the end of an era, too.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Very Strange Family and Joe Mullins, Too

(Originally published on 11/10/11)

While still in the throes of mourning a shuttered diner and the only bona fide sacred place I’ve ever known, I find it therapeutic to unearth memories from this formerly consecrated ground. Today, permit me to resurrect the "Very Strange Family" and a classic nine-to-five drunkard nicknamed "Joe Mullins," who were regular patrons of the diner. I’d venture to say the cross-section of human beings who ate here were a microcosm of the wider world, or—at the very least—the wider Bronx.

It’s hard to do justice with mere words to the Very Strange Family, who enjoyed repasts alongside me in the diner for several years. You really had to see them live and in color to appreciate their unique brand of weirdness. The Very Strange Family consisted of a husband and wife with a son, Peter, who could have been an older teenager, or maybe a young man in his twenties. His greasy demeanor and darting eyes, however, made establishing an approximate age problematic.

At some point in time, the Very Strange Family entered the diner with a bundle of joy—an infant and fledgling member of the brood. Perhaps the toddler’s mother was not Peter's. But, really, none of this minutia really mattered, because what bound the family together was their strangeness. Ma, Pa, and Peter seemed perpetually on edge. Their eyes were always flitting—up and down, back and forth—and they immediately sensed when foreign eyes were looking their way. The Very Strange Family jumped the shark for me when the woman of the house decided to change her newborn’s dirty diaper on a table a couple of booths away. Eventually, the amateur detective in me came to the conclusion they were either members of organized crime—low-level weaselly types operating on the fringes—or in a witness protection program and fearing members of the mob. It had to be one or the other.

Conversely, Joe Mullins was easy enough to figure out. He worked in some nine-to-five bureaucratic job. His credentials—the identification pass hanging around his neck—told us as much. And, each night, when he stepped off the Number 7 bus on his way home, he’d patronize the liquor store that was conveniently a stone’s throw away from the bus stop. Carrying that familiar black liquor store plastic bag, with the latticework insignia on it, Mullins would then cross the street and enter the diner.

A friend of mine is responsible for christening him “Joe Mullins”—that wasn’t his real name—because he just seemed like a “Joe Mullins” to him. From our vantage point, Mullins came across as a harmless sort. But as a rule, he was ill at ease as he laid down his bag full of spirits and ordered his supper, which always consisted of the most boring and basic kind of sandwiches. His whiskey bottles invariably made audible clanking sounds, prompting meaningful glances all around from staff to customers and from customers to staff. The hapless Mullins once ordered “a ham and white on a Swiss.” For some reason, the diner brass just didn’t warm to the man, even though he was a repeat customer—you could see it in their faces and sense it in their body language. In the best diner milieus—like in life itself—everything is visceral. While Joe Mullins was always unfailingly polite, even meek, instinctively he just never was accepted into the diner fraternity.

Love Versus Hate: Mets Versus Yankees

(Originally published 10/25/2010)

While I’ve long ceased following professional baseball, I nonetheless concede to deriving a fair measure of pleasure when the Mighty Yankees go down, as they did this past week. Is there some sort of abiding life lesson here? Perhaps hate is a far more powerful and enduring emotion than love—at least in the arena of irrational sports fanaticism.

Raised in a Bronx household with a rabid Yankee fan as its patriarch, I declared my independence from all that as a mere seven-year-old. I don’t quite know why I broke ranks at such a tender age, and why I started rooting for the Mets, but I did with a vengeance. And I quickly realized that it was one or the other—no namby-pamby straddling and allegiance to both New York teams was allowed. The very first games I attended were actually in the original House that Ruth Built—the one with the uncomfortable wooden seats painted blue and the view-obstructing, concrete poles holding the old stadium together. I recall being at a Bat Day giveaway against the expansion Seattle Pilots during their first and only season as a franchise. (The team moved to Milwaukee in 1970, but, very historically, supplied the colorful and immensely entertaining backdrop for pitcher Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, which is a great book by the way. Believe it or not, this tome of his was considered sacrilege for its time, steeped in controversy for violating the locker room’s longstanding omerta.)

I suspect it was my wide-eyed innocence that coaxed the very impressionable me to the Mets, a team in the midst of an ethereal glow. You know, the Miracle of 1969, which had nothing to do with the Blessed Mother appearing on a slice of burnt toast or any such thing. It was all about perennial losers winning the whole enchilada in crazy, unsettled times against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles—amazing, amazing, amazing! David slays Goliath! And the fact that the Mets were televised a great deal more than the Yankees in those days of yore—on free TV, too, which was the only game in town—no doubt played a contributing and solidifying role in my declared allegiance. The battle lines were promptly drawn in the family, and with countless friends and neighbors as well—all fans of the corporate, highfalutin Yankees, despite the fact that they sucked lemons big time when I began my quarter of a century romance with their cross-town rivals.

But to get back to the love-versus-hate matter, and which of the two emotions emerge victorious in the end. I more or less lost interest in the game, and the team I loved with a passion since a boy, in the mid-1990s after a strike cancelled a World Series for the first time ever, and was still ongoing at the start of the next season. Along the way, ticket prices skyrocketed, and the players overtly, and rather dramatically and unapologetically, made greed and sheer disloyalty the hottest tickets in town. Then, of course, there were steroids, seventy-five home run seasons, and Barry Bonds breaking the great Hank Aaron’s record with both a literal head and ego the size of planet Jupiter.

I never consciously made the decision to turn in my fan card for all time. It occurred very gradually, with my fierce fan devotion waning with the passing years as the American pastime slowly but surely imploded. From my perspective, baseball once upon a time showcased a wholly unique ambiance with its slow and unfolding pace, strategy, and unpredictability. It was a game not held hostage by ticking clocks, flags, and annoying whistles—not to mention that there were many, many games on the schedule (162), with most of them played during the dog days of summertime, the best season of all for a kid.

But, ah, the question before us now is this: Why did my bowing out as an uber-fan not purge my simultaneous and heartfelt loathing for the Yankees? Granted, the wars were pretty bitter and intense back in the day between my beloved Mets and my father’s equally beloved Yankees. But that was ancient history. Or was it? I must confess that there’s still something about the Yankees, their fans, and that exasperating sense of entitlement that taps into that old hate. I may be a lapsed Met and former professional baseball fan—who’s gotten over the great love for his team and the sport—but hatred for the grisly opposition somehow never dies. 

Elegy for Alouishes...

(Originally published on 12/27/12)

English poet John Donne once wrote, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” I have no doubt that his words—these many centuries later—have been enshrined in a well-circulated Facebook meme. Still, I would have to disagree with the erudite Donne. Yes, a handful of men's and women’s deaths diminish me. But honestly, most don’t—in any way, shape, or form—because I didn’t know them in any way, shape, or form. However, a case could be made that some people’s deaths actually enhance me…and the wider world, too. But that’s for another blog topic.

I can think of one man, though, whom I didn’t know very well, whose untimely passing has diminished me in some nebulous but nonetheless profound way. I learned of his demise just a few days ago. He was a ubiquitous and reassuring presence in my favorite diner for more than a decade. Initially, I thought diner personnel were calling him “Al,” and then it sounded to me like “Louie.” So, I compromised and dubbed the man “Alouishes"—not to be confused with "Aloysius." Alouishes worked his way up from busboy to counterman to waiter. His former boss lavished the ultimate praise on him when he said, “He was one of us,” meaning Alouishes ultimately did it all in the bustling diner milieu—a considerable accomplishment—and was as loyal and dependable as they come.

I was told that Alouishes never missed a scheduled workday in his fourteen years on the job, which didn’t surprise me. He was a comforting constant when I patronized this very special diner—almost always there. While the man was not especially proficient in English, he rarely erred and effortlessly communicated in the fast and furious diner universe. He had a certain knack—a sixth sense—for zeroing in on his customers from great distances. Alouishes would often times have coffee on the table before my diner companions and I even entered the place. That’s the kind of guy he was. He kept a vigilant eye on our cups, too, making sure they were never empty.

Alouishes became a welcome part of my life for a spell, and when my diner—the last of its kind— shut its doors a year ago, it was an end of an era for sure. However, I never imagined it would be end of a very good man. I learned this past week that Alousishes was approximately my age—too young to die just like that of a heart attack and stroke. Perhaps there’s a cautionary tale in all of this. Working seven days a week, long hours, and not attending to one’s health—and all those warning signs—is, maybe, not the best life course. Why not find that happy medium instead? R.I.P., Alouishes. Your death diminishes me…and so many others.

The Revenge of the Uncola

Almost a half century ago, a sixty-four-ounce glass bottle of 7up, the uncola, left its mark. It was Christmas 1973, when soda pop came in glass, not plastic, bottles and were measured in ounces, not liters. Anyway, if memory serves, my brothers and I were playing a game of Skittle-Bowl, a Christmas gift that year, and about to partake in a little holiday bubbly.

Before opening the 7up bottle, I recall, it accidentally dropped to the floor. For every action there is a reaction. Retrieved, the now agitated uncola erupted, ejecting its bottle cap with such force that it passed through a plastic hanging lamp shade above. It left a jagged hole in it on its way to the ceiling.

It was one of those what could have been moments in the family history. One of us could have lost an eye or suffered some other serious injury from the unleashed uncola. But no physical harm came to any human on the scene. And the hanging lamp endures to this day as a reminder of what once was.

I miss 1973. The family car was a used 1968 Buick Skylark. The Mets were the National League champions. Local Sam’s Pizza served up a greasy delight back then when only whole pies were put in boxes, which were tied with string. Four oozing slices in a small paper bag was a sight to behold. My father called the place the “grease shop,” but the grease was—depending on the age of the pizza—a maker or breaker. There was good grease and bad grease, let’s put it that way.

There was a great bakery in the neighborhood, too: Shelvyn’s. Standout standalone bakeries are hard to come by nowadays in these parts. Supermarkets with their own bakery departments and changing tastes and times have seen to that. Once upon a time this otherworldly bakery on the main thoroughfare served up a cream donut the likes of which will never be sampled again. It was deep-fried, dense, and delicious. Not unlike the grease factor with pizza, the dense factor with donuts can either be a good thing or a bad thing.

I haven’t had 7up in quite a while. I wonder if it still tastes the way it did when Geoffrey Holder was the product’s TV pitchman and bottle caps passed through lampshades at warp speed. Probably not. For it was a simpler time when the Skylark, with my father behind the wheel, slid off an icy road into a ditch in the environs of Bangor, Pennsylvania, home of my maternal grandparents. A good Samaritan—a farmer in his tractor—got us back on course. That also was Christmastime 1973. A lot happened that week. It’s fair to say that then I wasn’t mulling over what life would be like in 2022.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)