camera.
This was a place called Kensico, an Indian name. The field we played in was at the foot of a high sheer bluff covered with bushes and trees and vines. The tracks of the New York Central ran along the top of the bluff. Trains came along, but they were so high above the meadow and the trees they seemed no bigger than toy electric trains. Whenever we heard the whistle of the locomotive, we stopped what we were doing and stood still in the grass before we saw it. And then it appeared, the tiny train, and we waved and the engineer, who was too small to be seen, blew his whistle in greeting.
B ut the spring had its maniac leer, some dissolving smile of menace that I couldn’t quite catch sight of. The whole earth was pushing up, everything was turning out and open. My arms and legs hurt, and my mother told me I had growing pains. I thought I would rather not feel myself growing. I felt my heart banging and understood life as something that lived itself in you, an irresistible animating power that was mindless enough to go out of control, like the spring in a windup toy that without warning would run amok and bust itself to pieces.
A genial man from the neighborhood whose name was Ziggy walked past my house every day. His head was the size of a watermelon; the little features, including the tiny smiling mouth, were way up front. Ziggy walked with mincing steps, shuffling, his knees bent, his too-heavy head bobbing this way and that so that it appeared it might topple him over at any moment. Ziggy laughed and clapped his hands like a baby when he saw something that pleased him. My mother told me she’d heard he was a mathematical genius.
Even among children, people of my own ilk, there were some who didn’t act right or were tremblingly uncoordinated or had half-grown limbs or clubfeet. I knew a pair of twin boys my age—they came to my first few birthday parties; one was normally nasty and verbal, the other a saint of retardedness. They were identical twins and when little had sat side by side in one of those double strollers of brown wicker.
From the tenement behind my backyard all sorts of urgent and enraged cries rose on the spring night. My room was in the rear of our house, just over the garage. The clotheslines were strung from tenement windows to the creosoted pole like the cables of a bridge. I saw things I wasn’t looking for, people in the lighted windows in their underwear, women pulling themselves out of their corsets. Prowling about, sometimes at dusk,or on cold mornings of rain when everyone still slept, strange youths not from the neighborhood came vaulting over the fences into our yard. They climbed the retaining wall and disappeared. These were boys who hated boundaries and straight lines, who traveled as a matter of principle off the streets, as if they needed to trespass and show their scorn of property. They wore felt hats with the brims cut away and the crown folded back along the edge and trimmed in a triangle pattern. They wore undershirts for shirts and high-top sneakers without socks. They carried cigarettes behind their ears. Slingshots stuck out of their back pockets. They were the same boys who rode the backs of the trolley cars by standing on the slimmest of fenders and holding on to the window frames with their fingertips. They wrestled sewer covers off their seats and climbed down in the muck to find things. They were the ones, I knew, who chalked the strange marks on our garage doors.
I had noticed these chalk marks one day while in the yard. Donald and his friends were building a Ping-Pong table. It was to be a marvel of a table, hinged in the middle and painted regulation green with ruled edges. It was to rest on sawhorses. Donald and his friends were quietly and cooperatively building their table for a contentious Ping-Pong tournament full of shouting. I caused them to look up from their work by pointing out the sign on the garage doors. I wanted to know what it was.
I hadn’t
This was a place called Kensico, an Indian name. The field we played in was at the foot of a high sheer bluff covered with bushes and trees and vines. The tracks of the New York Central ran along the top of the bluff. Trains came along, but they were so high above the meadow and the trees they seemed no bigger than toy electric trains. Whenever we heard the whistle of the locomotive, we stopped what we were doing and stood still in the grass before we saw it. And then it appeared, the tiny train, and we waved and the engineer, who was too small to be seen, blew his whistle in greeting.
B ut the spring had its maniac leer, some dissolving smile of menace that I couldn’t quite catch sight of. The whole earth was pushing up, everything was turning out and open. My arms and legs hurt, and my mother told me I had growing pains. I thought I would rather not feel myself growing. I felt my heart banging and understood life as something that lived itself in you, an irresistible animating power that was mindless enough to go out of control, like the spring in a windup toy that without warning would run amok and bust itself to pieces.
A genial man from the neighborhood whose name was Ziggy walked past my house every day. His head was the size of a watermelon; the little features, including the tiny smiling mouth, were way up front. Ziggy walked with mincing steps, shuffling, his knees bent, his too-heavy head bobbing this way and that so that it appeared it might topple him over at any moment. Ziggy laughed and clapped his hands like a baby when he saw something that pleased him. My mother told me she’d heard he was a mathematical genius.
Even among children, people of my own ilk, there were some who didn’t act right or were tremblingly uncoordinated or had half-grown limbs or clubfeet. I knew a pair of twin boys my age—they came to my first few birthday parties; one was normally nasty and verbal, the other a saint of retardedness. They were identical twins and when little had sat side by side in one of those double strollers of brown wicker.
From the tenement behind my backyard all sorts of urgent and enraged cries rose on the spring night. My room was in the rear of our house, just over the garage. The clotheslines were strung from tenement windows to the creosoted pole like the cables of a bridge. I saw things I wasn’t looking for, people in the lighted windows in their underwear, women pulling themselves out of their corsets. Prowling about, sometimes at dusk,or on cold mornings of rain when everyone still slept, strange youths not from the neighborhood came vaulting over the fences into our yard. They climbed the retaining wall and disappeared. These were boys who hated boundaries and straight lines, who traveled as a matter of principle off the streets, as if they needed to trespass and show their scorn of property. They wore felt hats with the brims cut away and the crown folded back along the edge and trimmed in a triangle pattern. They wore undershirts for shirts and high-top sneakers without socks. They carried cigarettes behind their ears. Slingshots stuck out of their back pockets. They were the same boys who rode the backs of the trolley cars by standing on the slimmest of fenders and holding on to the window frames with their fingertips. They wrestled sewer covers off their seats and climbed down in the muck to find things. They were the ones, I knew, who chalked the strange marks on our garage doors.
I had noticed these chalk marks one day while in the yard. Donald and his friends were building a Ping-Pong table. It was to be a marvel of a table, hinged in the middle and painted regulation green with ruled edges. It was to rest on sawhorses. Donald and his friends were quietly and cooperatively building their table for a contentious Ping-Pong tournament full of shouting. I caused them to look up from their work by pointing out the sign on the garage doors. I wanted to know what it was.
I hadn’t
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