street memories

I've just returned to this website for the second time since I wrote a post on June 29th. "Guest" thought it was a fake post. No, I'm a real live 75 year old guy who loves creative names. In fact, I've just written a children's book called "The king Who Gave Names".I'll send it to guest or anyone else who would like to read it. I'll monitor the site.
In the meantime,I'll try to enclose a story i wrote about my pop, which is part of my very large memoir.
Ira Spector-"pussylocks"

My Pop - by Ira Spector
My father was a very handsome guy when he was young. Faded photographs, older than my sepia memory bears testimony on the fading pages of our family album. Apparently he parlayed those good looks into being quite a ladies man before my mother snagged and removed him from the meat market. I heard stories of his prowess as a wild cocksman when he was single. He remarked with awe to his brother Dave”, this certain young lady; could pee into a coke bottle standing up without spilling a drop”. That was my Pop!
I grew up in the fifties through the fits and starts of adolescence, the revealing mysteries of puberty and the inculcation of ambition all Jewish boys are indoctrinated with before leaving home. Growing up I never thought of my father as handsome or ugly. He was just Pop! He was good to me as a kid, but afflicted with a terrible depression that permeated his behavior and personality, and prevented a close relationship between us. His perpetual sadness limited his sharing of life experiences and wisdom’s that might have guided me from making some of the mistakes I later did in life. However one time he did do something for me for which I have everlasting gratitude
I was a sophomore in Brooklyn College, and flunked the only course in my school career- Structural Geology. I was quite discouraged and depressed because Geology was my major. I had trouble interpreting mathematically how certain layers of rock on the surface in one area would emerge in another outcrop some distance away. In shame and despair, I wanted to quit school for a while and get a job. Pop feared that once I quit, I would be sucked into the vortex of the working world and never return to complete my education. He pleaded with me to stay in school, but it fell on deaf ears. He then asked me to talk to “Red” the house painter in our building. “Red”, square jawed, tough, hard as a rock, and street wise, looked me in the eye and said “look shmuck you want to wind up a painter like me. I never had the opportunity that your father and mother are offering you. Don’t blow it or you’ll regret it the rest of your life”. I finally got the message, stayed in school, transferring to New York University and graduated with honors two and a half years later. My parents never told me, but I think graduation day was probably the happiest day I had ever given them, and relief too.
Everyone in our family, including Pop’s brothers and sisters thought the origin of his depression was psychological. He thought of himself as a failure for blowing the only money he had accumulated in his life. I thought his condition was psychological too, until many years later when his younger brother, my Uncle Dave, a successful factory manager, quite suddenly came down with severe depression that lasted the rest of his life.
In Graduate school in 1972 I first learned about chemical depression, which is genetic in origin. The body lacks a certain chemical that affects behavior. People diagnosed with this malady take medicine for the rest of their lives to compensate for the deficiency and can lead a normal life. I suspect this was probably the source of both my father and my Uncle’s problems. My father’s two other brothers seemed to exhibit moroseness associated with their personalities as well.
Pop thought he was a failure, because he only had a sixth grade education. This was pretty typical of his generation. There was no money in his immigrant parent’s household, and he had to get a job to pay his way. He finally made some money after marrying my mother. Uncle Dave and he opened a Malt and Hop shop during prohibition in Babylon Long Island. The business flourished, prohibition was still the law of the land, and they did some bootlegging to augment sales. Everything was going fine and the money poured in. Pop bought a fancy cream convertible car, wore argyle socks with his golf knickers, and looked and acted like a Great Gatsby dandy, but he never forgot his family. Every Saturday morning, he drove to Brooklyn, an hour’s drive in the nineteen thirties. There he picked up my Grandma Molly and my two cousins Ethel and Phyllis to spend the weekend in Babylon. They lived together with Aunt’s Shirley and Dotty. Five women in one small apartment, with one bathroom, which must have been miserable.
One day mobsters came to pay the two brother’s a visit, warned them about muscling in on the mob’s bootlegging territory, and suggested they quit the business. If they didn’t they were warned, various of their body parts would be found in selected garbage dumps and polluted waterways throughout the greater New York area. They shut the doors within the hour.
It was 1933, the depths of the Great Depression. There was not much job opportunity for educated men, and certainly less for one who never went beyond the sixth Grade and had no particular skills or trade. Additionally, Pop had a wife and child (my sister Beryl, I was not born yet) to provide for. It must have been scary times.

Luckily he found a job as a building superintendent in Brooklyn. This provided the family

Posted by: pussylocks at August 29, 2008 11:11 PM

continuing the story of My Pop-by Ira Spector
. This provided the family with an apartment to live in, and money to put food on the table. However, as the euphoria of getting a job faded, the long shadows of time cast a weighty darkness over his self-esteem that never lifted till the day he died.
Growing up with two depressions, the nations and my father’s did not seem to affect my sister or myself. Pop must have laughed, but I can’t remember when. He never played with me, but I don’t remember other friend’s father’s sharing those experiences with their kids either. It could be that in those tough days they were too busy trying to put food on the table, and had little energy left for anything else. Fortunately there were lots of school friends and kids who lived on our block for me to interact with and dissipate my exuberant energy in sports. Family entertainment was visiting my relative’s homes’ and they in turn visited us.
I remember only two occasions my parents took me to the movies. My mother initiated me into this fantasy world at the Rogers Theater. We walked the eleven blocks to the theater, and Mom paid the five-cent entrance fee for each of us. It was 1937 or thereabouts. I was 4-5 years old. The film was “Peck’s Bad Boy at the Circus”. I can still recall in vivid detail the boy character, how his voice sounded, and the bright black and white images on the screen. There were no gray subtleties in those early days of film. After the show we walked the eleven blocks back home. The expensive nickel trolley car was out of the question.
When Pop wanted to get away from home for an afternoon, he would take a subway to Manhattan; go to a movie, followed by dinner at the Automat. He would go through the cafeteria line choose his favorite meal, Salisbury steak with baked beans and macaroni and cheese. One time he allowed me to accompany him on one of these adventures. The movie is long forgotten, but I still salivate thinking about that gourmet delight at the Automat.
My father was good to me. I can only remember one time when he beat me, and boy did I deserve it. As building “Super” he possessed passkeys to all the apartments in case of emergencies. I must have been about 10 years old and stole a key to the apartment of a couple of kids I knew in the building. I stole 33 dollars I knew they had saved in their dresser drawer and I blew it with a high time at Coney Island on rides, games, and of course Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and whatever else I could stuff in my face. Unbelievably my 10-year-old clueless crime was solved, and my father quietly brought me into my bedroom, closed the door, and unmercifully beat the crap out of me. I don’t remember him being mad at me, or yelling and screaming. I think he just believed this was the best way to punish me. I have no recollection of him ever hitting me before or after that memorable event. Surprisingly I have no permanent scars from the impressionable experience. It cured my career in crime… almost…
I turned seventeen and had been elected to the exalted position of President of “The Rebels” by my school buddies. We formed a cellar club. Cellar clubs were local phenomena in the neighborhood surrounding Thomas Jefferson, my high school in East New York. Travel to the school involved a twenty five-minute walk and a subsequent thirty-minute subway ride. Homeowners in this lower middle class neighborhood had “finished” basements, and rented these palaces with separate entrances to groups of high school students for use as social clubs. These palaces were for dances, card playing, listening to music, and heavy necking and petting with girl friends on the inevitable broken down furniture decorating these consecrated establishments.
My Uncle Henry taught me to drive with his four-door fluid drive semi automatic Desoto automobile on Linden Boulevard; a busy four-lane road passing by the red brick government built “project” where he lived. I passed my junior driver’s test allowing me to drive only with a mature licensed driver sitting besides me(age 21 to drive alone). This was a law begging to be broken. Our family car was a new four door sleek black Kaiser, perfect for the “Rebels” to cruise in. One Saturday night I waited till my parents were asleep, tiptoed quietly into their bedroom, and lifted the car keys from my father’s pants which were draped over the chair to preserve the crease. I then drove the half-hour to a rendezvous with my constituents at our cellar clubhouse.
A carload of us piled in and off we drove to “Nathan’s Famous” hot dog stand that never closed in Coney Island an hour drive away. There we gorged on delectable goodies. My personal favorite was Chow Mein sandwiches on a soft bun, followed by a half dozen Little Neck clams. I had a cast iron stomach in those days, and the figure to prove it.

A side show gathering of loud mouth tough guys from other Brooklyn neighborhoods were always at these late night feeding orgies at Nathan’s. We steered a wide, wary path around them, all the while fascinated by their haberdashery. Thug clothes featured very tight pegged cuffed pants of vivid electric blue, with white rear pockets shaped like pistols, and a white stitch running down the sides of the legs. Other color pantaloons favored by these felons-in training were chartreuse yellow/green with black accents, or white with black details.
The favored hairstyle of these hoodlums was called a DA or “duck’s ass”. This coiffure a shiny well-greased tall pompadour with slick horizontal combed sides ended in a peak where the two sides met in the rear of the head, thus the inspiration for the name. The

Posted by: pussylocks at August 29, 2008 11:46 PM

part-3 My Pop by Ira Spector
The hair ended abruptly with a razor sharp horizontal slice immediately below this convergence across the entire width of the head.
By the time I returned home, it was almost dawn, but enough time to safely return the car keys to the pocket where they belonged. I was so successful in this late night caper; I decided to repeat it the following weekend. Late Saturday night off went the Rebel’s again with their fearless leader at the wheel. We had a great time, and returned with full bellies, belching and farting our way to the clubhouse door, myself included. I soon discovered I had locked the keys in the car. Oh boy! On the Subway ride home I had horrible fantasies of terrible things my father could and would lay on me in punishment. There was no possible story I could think of that would work to get me out of this one.
The next morning I confessed my foul deed to the folks at the breakfast table, and awaited my doom. My mother said nothing. My father in a calm voice asked me specifically where the car was located. I said I would go with him to get it. He calmly said, “no, he would go by himself’. I still waited for the anvil to fall. He rose from the table without a further word, got a spare set of keys, and set off to retrieve the vehicle with the seven block walk to the subway, the half hour train ride, and several block’s walk to where the car was parked, and then drove home. Amazingly I never heard another word about the incident again from either of my folks and I certainly never asked any questions. This finally ended my career in crime.
I was indoctrinated to prejudice at an early age. “Colored people”, or “Shvatza’s” as Jewish people called them were always a part of my life. We lived two blocks distant from the notorious Bedford Stuyvesant slums, which was all black. My first love in the third grade was a cute mulatto chick with glasses. I loved walking home with her after school, showing off for her by doing a balancing act on the low brick and stone wall along our path. Our love affair ended when I graduated to another school in the second half of the school year.
The first job in my work career at the age of thirteen was at the C&S meat market. I became a friend with “Ducky” a giant of a black teenager who worked there too. One Saturday night I invited him home after work to watch a champion boxing match. Our eleven inch round black and white television set sat in the middle of our living room. Ducky’s family like most blacks in the”hood” did not yet own TVs. My folk’s were not home and we enjoyed the slugfest on the screen. They did come in sometime during the match, said hello to both of us, and retired to their bedroom. When the match was over and Ducky went home, Pop came into my bedroom and quietly said, “don’t invite colored people into our apartment again, it’s not a good idea”. This attitude was partly based on fear. Our apartment was robbed several times by desperate black people who dangerously climbed into our windows in snow, and climbed into our bedrooms by lifting up the screens in the warm months when the windows were open
Part of Pop’s job was to rent the apartments. There were never any vacancies when a black person inquired, with one exception. In one apartment lived a gay black man George that I liked and thought was very wise. He was the chauffeur and lover for his white lease-holder roommate.
Reminiscing about Pop always leads me to one of my fondest memories with him. One Saturday night I stayed home for the evening. I was seventeen. Pop asked me to go down to the basement to help him lift some heavy object. We were in the elevator, when he said in his normal unemotional depressed voice “What’s the matter son, don’t you have a date tonight?” “No Pop” I answered. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you”, he stated evenly and unsmiling, “when I was your age I had women chasing after me with mattresses on their backs”! I had to hold onto the elevator railing to keep from collapsing on the floor in silent laughter. That’s my Pop!

Posted by: pussylocks at August 30, 2008 11:43 AM