Grandpa, Woodside, Rockaway

In his later years, grandpa lived in a railroad apartment on Skillman Avenue in Woodside.

The rooms lined up like boxcars, hence the name.

The only windows were at the front and back.

Wait -- not true.

There was another window – in the middle room.

It opened onto a “light well” between buildings, an airshaft of sorts.

I forgot the window because it looked at a brick wall.

Andy Warhol might have loved the repetitive brick motif, but for me, looking out a window at a brick wall was like driving a car with no motor.

One day, my brother opened that window and said he saw a dead cat at the bottom.

“Come take a look”, he said, as he held the window open.

I was immediately suspicious.

Without knowing it, he had successfully trained me to doubt anything he said.

He would sound convincing each time, and it had worked a hundred times before, but by now I had caught on.

In the school yard, years later, I would appreciate the training when one of the guys would say to a new kid, “Hey, there’s a guy on the corner giving out 100 dollar bills," and the new kid would say, “Really, let’s go get one," as the rest of us rolled our eyes. T

hanks to my brother, I could roll my eyes with the best of them.

He wasn’t going to push me out the window to a certain death, not intentionally anyway, but this was the same brother who bumped me off a dock fully dressed into an upstate lake when I was 5 years old.

I remember looking up at him as I fell backwards, noticing that he didn’t seem at all concerned as he watched me sink, as if watching a physics experiment unfold, which I think saved my life since it calmed me as I realized that the bottom of the lake was not rising up to meet me.

So, I calmly swam to the surface and dog-paddled, shoes and all, over to a pier post a few feet away.

I held on and waited for someone to lift me out, mother screaming unintelligibly the whole time.

It was an “accident," he told her.

So, as tempting as seeing a dead cat can be, I respectfully declined his offer.

Another “accident” averted.

Of course, there was no dead cat, just the remains of the fictional character John Locke from the TV series “Lost."

These apartments are called “Mathews Flats."

They were built by the famous developer Gustave X. Mathews who, in 1915, in a capitalistic fervor, found a new way to cram rent-paying tenants into high-density ghettos.

He and his crack architectural team spent upwards of 10 minutes, and I am being generous here, on room layout.

At the time, however, they were a significant step up from the slums of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, so let's not be so quick to judge Mr. Mathews.

Everyone needs a place to live, and if entrepreneurs such as Matthews had not had the vision, and taken the risk, a lot of immigrants might have stayed in the “old country” and lived in peaceful green pastures, eating fresh meat and produce while drinking home made beer and reciting James Joyce late into the evening.

No, that wasn’t good enough for our pioneer-obsessed ancestors.

They wanted to eat packaged food laced with toxic chemicals, breathe polluted air, pay high rents and study the art of “the brick."

Every month, with rents like this rolling in, Gustave could easily afford to add another glockenspiel to his growing collection.

Can’t help but note the parallels between Mathews and Trump.

Mathews built flats and Trump built towers.

Yes, but Mathews did not run for president – smart guy!

At various times, my mom sent me to grandpa’s.

This was just a couple of blocks from our apartment.

It was not a complicated trip -- no airline flight over Canada where the pilot has a heart attack, crash lands, dies, leaving me marooned in a thick forest with only a hatchet and wild berries to live on, fighting bears and wild moose, sheltering in a rock cave by a big lake (sorry, different story, “The Hatchet” – great read).

I loved staying with grandpa.

I didn’t have to compete with my brothers, and ate like a king.

He fed me the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white (cut diagonally for maximum biting area), tall glass of chocolate milk (with spoon, for your stirring pleasure); chocolate pudding for dessert.

I know what you’re thinking: The man was a culinary genius.

The back room was the main bedroom, but he didn’t sleep there and I wondered why.

I was never invited there, and was led away whenever I strayed, but curiosity kept bringing me back.

I didn’t know what I was looking at back then, but it was a memorial to my uncle Danny.

It consisted of a large picture of Danny decked out in Army uniform, lots of military decorations, an American flag, and surrounded by statues and candles.

Daniel J. O’Connor; born Brooklyn, NY, 1916; KIA, WWII, 1942.

He was grandpa’s oldest child and my mom’s big brother.

Grandpa taught me to pray.

“Say your Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s. Then, talk to God. Ask forgiveness -- you’ll need it."

Amen.

When I got back home, I tried to explain the benefits of a high-chocolate diet to my mom but she ignored me.

She kept offering me meat, potatoes, oatmeal, vegetables, eggs and milk (without chocolate syrup!)

How could she, daughter of a food expert, be so ignorant of fine dining?

Then it struck me: my grandmother!

I never knew her.

She passed away when I was a toddler.

She must have taught my mom about nutrition -- darn.

In the summer, grandpa stayed in a Rockaway bungalow he rented.

Well into his seventies, full head of grey hair, white tank top tee shirt, suspender-ed baggy pants, and rosary in hand, he would walk the bungalow area in the evening, sending up Hail Mary’s between pit stops.

Jeremiah O’Connor was an Irish Catholic – make no mistake about it.

My mother gave him reasons to seek heavenly help.

For starters, she married a man he did not approve of.

By all accounts, he was right to be concerned, but my mother didn’t sit around debating the issue.

She was 21, and went right to work birthing four boys in six years. (Call me, “number four”).

Although dad and grandpa did not get along, they at least had the decency to limit their arguments to important matters, such as whether or not TV wrestling was real or fake.

Dad insisted it was complete theatrics, while grandpa insisted it was real competitive wrestling.

It certainly looked fake, especially the way Gorgeous George paraded around the ring as if it were a beauty pageant, but those guys could do some serious damage with those biceps.

I benefited greatly from these debates because it gave me something important to think about while I was under my desk at school with my hands covering my head during an the air raid drill.

I have no idea how the threat of nuclear war affected my brain.

It’s funny how an innocent child is dropped into a family, like a pop stick into a raging river.

I didn’t have the necessary vocabulary yet, but my first thoughts must have been: “How the f-bomb did I get HERE?”

I was a little twig growing in a jungle.

A jungle full of twig-eating predators.

Grandpa provided occasional shelter, like a tall oak.

My mother nurtured me, but she had also produced three dangerous predators (AKA older brothers).

I was never sure whose side she was on.

?“Knock, knock”.

“Who goes there?”

?“It’s your mother, let me in”.

“Not good enough. Drop the predators, keep your hands where I can see them, and step back from the door!”

In the summer, my mom asked any neighbor going to Rockaway to take me to 101st street.

They would drop me off to meet grandpa, usually in the evening.

Even now, I can feel the cool ocean breeze greeting me as I crawled out from under the beach gear in the back seat of someone’s car.

I lived with him in his bungalow for weeks at a time.

It was adequate for the summer, with a screened-in porch and bathroom, but the shower was outside and cold water only.

It’s fair to say that a cold shower is torture at any age.

He would tell me to take a shower whenever I got back from the beach.

I’d say, “I was just in the water, why do I need a shower?”

He’d yell at me to shower anyway and be sure to wash off all the sand.

I’d go around the side of the bungalow to the shower and turn it on and jump back – ice cold.

I’d wave a toe under it, make some noises, wait a few minutes, and come back with a towel wrapped around me.

Problem solved.

I met a local Rockaway kid named Ricky.

He lived in a house, not a bungalow, all year round.

He was friendly, even charismatic, so I followed him on various adventures – he knew the territory, was a good kid, and had lots of ideas for games – climbing trees, running on/under the boardwalk, jumping off the boardwalk into the sand, etc.

He had a friend, nicknamed “Fish”.

Fish too lived in Rockaway all year, but in a modified bungalow.

He was always barefoot.

He had none of Ricky’s personal skills, and openly resented me for coming between him and his best friend, but I understood, and we got along anyway.

We were an odd trio as we cruised the beach, and the bay, in the summer evenings.

The bay was as much fun as the beach, only different.

At the bay, fishermen, young and old, maybe not with the skill of Olympians, but certainly with equal dedication, busied themselves with killing, maiming, torturing and dismembering various aquatic creatures from dawn to dusk, using very sharp knives.

The cycle of life was complete when they fed the body parts back as bait.

This was such a popular activity you had to get up early to get a spot at the railing that overlooked the bay.

Some people camped there.

There was always some skinny guy, with a deep tan, and a couple of missing teeth, saying, “Hey, lookie here” as he pointed to some mutant crab-like jelly fish creature, tentacles splayed in all directions, that had somehow crawled out of the sea over night.

And, never mention that you once stuck your finger with a fishhook around these “sportsmen."

They will interrupt you to tell you the one about the guy who didn’t look behind when casting, and the hook snagged another guy's eye and …. I’ll let you finish the story.

Grandpa didn’t have the energy to follow me around.

He used threats to keep me in line, but it didn’t work.

I would blast through the screen door like a rocket, him shouting, “Where are you going? Don’t slam that door!” as the door slammed behind me, BAM, like a sonic boom.?

He sat in a rocking chair on the porch for hours at a time.

I loved rocking there too, when I wasn’t running out the door, BAM.

Sometimes I went around the corner to Rockaway Playland, 98th street.

Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to the “nickel pitch."

The guy who invented this simple game was a genius and a model for all young entrepreneurs even today.

He figured out a way to have people throw money at him.

His only job, as tedious as this may sound, was to catch it.

Of course, they were just nickels, but this went on day and night and there was no age limit to throw the money.

I saw parents give nickels to toddlers to throw away, I mean, onto the slab.

Pure genius!

Here’s how it worked.

You threw your nickel onto a big rectangular slab, about two feet off the ground.

There was a railing around the slab that kept you about 3 feet away from any side.

The flat shiny slab had colorful circles painted on it of various sizes, placed randomly, or so it seemed.

If your nickel stopped completely inside a circle you got a big prize (big stuffed animal or some such), the size of the prize inversely proportional to the size of the circle.

There was a smaller prize if your nickel stopped so as to touch a circle but not be entirely inside.

The novice player, as I know from experience, would toss their nickel with too much force and it would simply slide off the slab into the pockets that were attached to the edges of the slab.

The slab was polished to minimize friction, encouraging the nickel to just keep sliding until, oops, it was off the slab and into the owner’s pocket.

Talk about easy money.

It took a little practice to get your nickel to stop on the slab, let alone inside one of the small circles.

Yes, there were occasional winners, but the nickels just kept rolling in to cover the cost and much more.

The design had enough circles to make winning look plausible with a little aim, and if that failed the sheer number of circles made it look like you could get lucky.

Boy, looks can be deceiving.

I would aim carefully and get no prize.

Then I would just toss the nickel randomly and still get no prize.

Of course, I did not have a lot of nickels to throw away, but if I had any loose change in my pocket when I walked by the nickel pitch, it flew out of my pocket and into the owner’s, and it was totally legal.

(Note: A nickel back then was worth about 500 of today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. Actually, that isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds -- many of those nickels were buffalo and Indian head.)

The nickel-pitch embodies the first principle of finance, taught at all state colleges today.

a) People want to throw their money away.

b) Put up a colorful target, any target will do,

c) Be ready to catch the money and funnel it into your pocket.

The subtlety, if there is one, is that it does not matter how ridiculous the target is, any non-zero chance of winning will do.

The state lottery is the most obvious of today’s examples.

At the end of a long day at the beach, the bay, or Playland, I’d get tired and lonely and whine for my mother, crying, “I want my mother," over and over.

Grandpa would patiently shhh me and try to bribe me with extra chocolate pudding, but I would continue to cry, asking, “Where’s my mother?”

As this clash of wills played out, he would finally say, “She’s on the roof!”

This answer would move me from despondent to angry.

This lame ploy had been thrown at me many times before.

But, he stuck to the script, and something deep inside said to play along, take the bait, this was as good as it was going to get -- no mom tonight.

I’d grab a breath, and say, “She’s not on the roof!”

“Be quiet and listen for a minute, you will hear her."

I’d interrupt my chorus of woeful cries to listen for a moment.

“I don’t hear anything! Where’s my mother?”

“OK, let’s go outside and climb up on the roof and find out."

“OK."

With me quieting down and heading for the door, he’d ask me to wait for him.

He’d get a sweater and ask me if I wanted one.

Then he’d ask if I wanted to finish the pudding.

Did I want a little more chocolate milk?

He’d put up some dishes, check the lights, start to go out and then forget something, and then come back to wash a glass, and then we’d go out.

Getting darker and darker outside.

The moment we were outside he’d point to, or claim to see, something unusual, such as, “Hey, did you see that lizard?”

At some point, the sun would set and the tall oak would swoop me up and drop me in a bed.

Snore.

As summer came to an end, a motor-less car would take me back to Woodside.

It wasn’t an easy transition.

From barefoot, bathing suits, and towels to the blue pants, ties, and white shirts of St. Sebastian’s.

Even so, as the new school year started I felt a renewed sense of strength and purpose.

As I stood in line in the schoolyard on the first day of school, I celebrated by burning holes in my tie with a magnifying glass.

A Nun saw what I was doing and yelled, “What are you doing?”

I looked up expecting to see a tall oak tree but instead saw the dark outline of an equally imposing but noticeably more animated figure.

I was too frightened to respond orally, and I knew it was a rhetorical question anyway, but I was thinking, “You think this is bad? You should see what they are doing to innocent marine life down at the bay. And, don’t bother calling my mother. I have it from good sources that she’s on a roof in Rockaway."