Read Online Still Pitching by Michael Steinberg - Free Book Online Page B

school took us through neighborhoods our parents had warned us about since we were kids. Once you got past McGuire’s Bar and Grill on Beach 108th, all you’d see were seedy looking bars, gated liquor stores, rundown markets, weed choked vacant lots, shuttered stores, ramshackle houses, and shops with iron bars on the windows. I’d been idealizing neighborhoods like these all summer. But when I saw them in person, I was unnerved by the ugliness and squalor. I couldn’t imagine growing up in these conditions.
    The kids who got on the bus after Beach 100th street were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics. Most lived in dilapidated old wooden homes with two or sometimes three other families. The Blacks and Puerto Ricans lived in the city funded housing projects close to the El.
    A lot of the white guys belonged to street gangs like the South Arverne Boy’s Club and the Hammels’ Raiders. They took special classes like automotive shop and woodworking. Many were just biding their time until they turned sixteen and could legally quit school.
    We all knew better than to mess with them. Like the characters in The Amboy Dukes , they had slicked back DAs and wore the same uniform each day: black motorcycle jackets with upturned collars, tight black T-shirts with cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves, Garrison belts and dungarees, or pegged pants with white stitches running down the sides, and black shit kickers (steel-toed boots with straps and buckles).
    The girls frequently came to school with curlers in their hair. They wore breast-hugging black sweaters, tight black wool skirts with slits down the side, black nylons with seams running down the back, and open-toed flats. Some had black cloth jackets with club names, like Pink Pussycats embroidered on the back. Most of them smoked and chewed gum.
    The greasers and their girlfriends sat in the back of the bus, their feet up on the seat backs, smoking and cursing loudly enough for everyone to hear.
    The school bus was a microcosm of the junior high social hierarchy—a pecking order that had even more sharply defined boundaries than those we’d established in grade school.
    Up front were the guys in the clique—who I now thought of as Archies and Reggies. They preened and held court with their Betty and Veronica girlfriends. The kids in the clique were clean-cut preppies. The boys—future class presidents and G.O. leaders—had VO-5-styled crew cuts, and they wore blue oxford button downs, khaki pants, and dirty white bucks. Their companions—would-be cheerleaders, baton twirlers, and boosters—were well-scrubbed, pony-tailed girls who dressed in starchy white blouses, plaid pleated skirts, and white bobby sox with saddle shoes.
    Sitting behind them was a most unusual group, comprised of four guys I thought of as “genteel greasers.” All four were from my grade school, and none of them were athletes, big brains, social movers, or even hardcore hoods.
    Their leader was Manny Angell—a ruggedly handsome Sephardic Jew whose father was rumored to be in the Jewish Mafia. Manny was tall, lean, and broad-shouldered, with a chiseled profile and a thick mane of dark, unruly hair. He had a brooding insolence that was reminiscent of a young Marlon Brando or the James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause .
    Manny’s comrades—Stuie Issacs, Jerry Shapiro, Paul Goldman, and Larry Ramis—were always in some kind of trouble it seems. The buzz back in sixth grade was that Manny and Larry had already been to reform school. They’d got caught hot wiring other people’s cars and taking them for joy rides in the Riis Park parking lot. I also heard that all of them smoked reefers, and that Paul and Larry raced souped-up Harleys. But the most titillating rumors were the ones about Manny and Stuie “going all the way” with the rich high school girls from the Five Towns—an exclusive enclave of gated