Friends

Bill 

Johnny was a kid I played with, confided in, relied upon.  A friend.  We spent many hours together in Jamaica Plain in the early fifties Those days were special.

As a kid, friends are other kids who live near you, people you enjoy being with and more often than not like the same things you do.  It helps too if their parents don't talk to you too much or even better ignore you entirely.  Your relationship is with the kid, not the parents. To me friends were those other kids who were always around, were rarely mean to you and who would share their stuff, half a cookie, a few of the Necco Wafers that weren't licorice, and who didn't mind having a drink out of your tonic bottle after you'd taken a swig.

You fight with friends, but forgiveness for some slight or betrayal is usually swift and sweet.  You also fake fight with near punches and plenty of spectacular spills and tumbles. You run from them while they try to shoot you or toss a grenade in your direction. You try to find them in the dark during hide 'n' seek; you chase them in a game of tag; you go with them on adventures: up to the tracks, running along walls, walks under the El. 

You use language with your friends in ways you don't with adults.  There's slang, swears.  There's also argument and reason as you try to persuade your friend to do something your way or go someplace you want to go. The words come easier because you feel you're on an equal footing with a friend. There's silliness and word play, ridiculous jokes, but also insight into the language that convinces and describes and even makes other kids laugh.  You're communicating. You're connecting.  It feels good.

There are quiet moments when you just talk, and times when you don't say much at all.  Your clothes are mostly dirty, there's always a cut or a scrape somewhere, your hair is in disarray.  At seven years-old, your friends are now more important than your parents. Until you meet a significant other that won't change. You challenge each other, compete with each other and help each other.  Your time together is boundless. Thankfully you have no idea how quickly it will all go by. 

My friend Johnny was more of a risk taker than I was.  He'd think nothing of sneaking up onto the elevated train platform to look through the slatted barrier to watch the trains come in, the doors opening and people passing in and out.  I'd go up there with him but I wouldn't do it if I were by myself. 

Still, we were a rough and tumble duo, running around a lot, both on the ground and on the brick wall by the Mendell School.  Johnny would be the one to initiate the sticks as sword games.  Sometimes even up on the wall. The shooting games would be not so much cowboys and Indians as war.  The Second World War had ended a few years before; Korea was ongoing. War was on our minds.  We didn't understand the reality of it but we did know that hand grenades were made to be thrown and machine guns were a lot more potent than pistols. Ironically I'd never seen a real gun in my life.  Thank movies and television. Without them I'd never even know what a gun was.  

In that era it wasn't just small arms we pretended to employ, there were also atomic weapons in our play arsenal. Thank our civil defense drills for that.

"You have to die," Johnny would yell, "I just threw an A-bomb at you."  Foolish at it sounds now, I'd often reply, "It missed!"  Even better was my retort, "No. You're dead.  I threw an H-bomb at you."  As little kids we were already aware of the relative destructive power of the different classes of nuclear weapons. In spite of the A and H-bombs tossed liberally, everyone was still standing.  It's obvious we didn't know about Hiroshima.

It wasn't all pseudo-violence. There were the occasional good deeds.  Hanging around the fire station on Washington near Columbus Avenue, we spotted one of the teachers at the Ellis Mendell School.  I don't know how old she was but she seemed elderly to us. 

We thought it would be a great idea if we helped her across the street. (This idea may have come from an incident in our Dick and Jane reader when Dick or Jane, maybe Spot, tried to help an old lady cross the street who, the whole time, resisted their efforts.)  Standing on the corner, our target was about to cross Washington when we came up from behind and, one on each side, took an arm.  I don't know if she were startled or irritated or amused, but she let us walk her across the street. We walked very slowly, very carefully as if we were transporting a delicate object rather than a person who was more than capable of getting to the other side without our assistance.  The amazing thing was that when we were safely to the other corner she opened up her pocketbook, fished about a moment, carefully took out two thin dimes and carefully pressed a coin into each of our palms.  We talked about that for days. 

My friend Roger was a different sort than Johnny, maybe a little older, a little more reserved.  He lived on the second floor of a house on School Street next door to the school.  My backyard was next to the school as well, but the grassy side; Roger's second floor windows looked down onto the school's back driveway.  The position of his house relative to the school has some significance as I'll relate in a bit.

I used to like going over to Roger's house, his mother didn't seem to mind kids being in there.  He had a sunny kitchen on the side opposite the school but what I liked best was the second floor front porch overlooking School Street.  That is where we used to play, or just sit on the chairs out there and enjoy the view from above.  I loved being out in the open air with that wide ranging view of my familiar environs.  Once my mother was at the top of Adams Circle calling me.  I spotted her from my porch viewpoint but not wanting to go home quite yet I ducked down so she couldn't see me.  I liked the porch for that strategic advantage it gave me, a little leverage in being able to see people before they saw me. In this case, I could make my own decision when I should go home. Being who I was I'm sure I left soon thereafter not wanting to disobey my mother.

There was one summer evening when a group of kids no one had ever seen before showed up in the neighborhood.  Group may be too kind.  I always refer to them as a gang of kids in telling this story. In my mind they were Goths bent on plunder and mayhem.

Somehow Roger and I got caught up with them as they ran through people's yards and across the street.  They yelled at Roger and pushed him out of the way; he pushed back and became aggressive.  They threatened me and I, well, began to cry.  I'll never forget Roger defending me, standing up for me, and extricating me from this group of what my mother would have called "fresh kids".  Together we ran up School Street to Adams Circle toward the safety of my house; whether anyone was chasing us I don't know.  Roger told my mother what happened without going into much detail about my lack of fortitude. AlI I could add to that conversation was, "We escaped!".   Roger never once mentioned the word "crybaby".  He had my back which is a rare attribute even in someone we think of as a friend.  Thanks, Roger.

For a short time I chummed around with a kid a year or so younger than I was, an African-American kid.  "That colored kid" was the way my father put it.  I'm grateful he did not use any harsher term, words I did not become familiar with until I was older.

I don't recall this kid's name or even where he lived.  School Street was right on the edge of Roxbury, an area that was changing demographically as southern blacks were in the midst of a history -changing Diaspora from the deep south to the cities of the North.  Boston was one destination. Roxbury was an area that was in transition with inexpensive housing and public transportation.   Both my mother and father had been born in Roxbury around the time of the First World War when it was an area sought out by emigrating Irish and other northern Europeans. Riding above Washington Street through Roxbury on the elevated train on the way into Boston, I would often peer into the windows of third floor apartments as they silently passed by the train windows. Those buildings, and those dark rooms, some with the windows open, some with curtains hanging out in the breeze, always seemed drab to me, and even a little haunted. They could have worked as inspirations for Hopper.

My friend probably lived on the other side of Columbus Avenue.  I recall him as friendly, energetic and someone my other friends got along with.  Other than that, did we go to movies together, did he come to my house to call me out, did he run the wall with me?  I don't know.  He was just another kid I played with. One day he was there and the next day he wasn't.

Another friend was a kid I met in school, Charlie.  He lived just across Armory Street but on this side of the train tracks.  There are friends who are friends with your other friends, and then there were kids like Charlie who didn't know my other friends. I didn't know his either.  We knew each other and that was enough. 

Since his neighborhood was a new area for me, he and I would do walk-arounds, low-key strolls in which we would walk somewhat aimlessly, talking, seeing what might be of interest on any particular day. There were a few factories down near his house, the tracks, a dead end street, and a couple of weed-strewn fields.  This is where we found the abandoned car.

I'm thinking now it was a Ford from about 1940 or 1941. That is what it looks like in my mind's eye.  There were no new cars out of Detroit from 1942 until sometime in 1946. The first truly new Ford wasn't in showrooms until 1949 or so.  People held on to their cars during the war, treating them well since the possibility of buying a new one, or even getting parts, was remote.  This abandoned Ford had likely been driven hard all through the war and beyond until it finally wore out.  How it ended up in a field is hard to say.  Charlie liked to think it was stolen. He'd "drive" it that way, pulling at the wheel, looking behind him as the cops closed in, ducking their bullets.

It was kind of a wreck, all the windows gone, windshield cracked, seats torn, the once fine finish faded, rusty holes in the large rear fenders, tires flat.  We didn't care.  We loved it.  It was our car.  The first time we spotted it we carefully cleaned out the accumulated leaves and trash.  Hopping inside we checked out the dashboard with its variety of knobs and dials.  We loved the speedometer and the old clock.  As a seven year-old I'd always be in the back seat of my father's car, so sitting in the driver's seat behind the wheel of "our" car, my hands on the column-mounted shifter, was thrilling.  I'm sure the gears were frozen but just being able to pretend to shift, hearing the clunk as we pressed on the clutch and the hiss as we worked the brake, was enough to convince us the car was speeding down the road.

Charlie would do most of the driving especially when we were being chased by cops after we'd robbed a bank.  I'd climb into the back to shoot at the people chasing us.  I liked it back there, in spite of the odor of damp upholstery.  The car was built solidly which added to my feeling of security. 

Sometimes we'd just sit in the car, indifferent to driving it.  It was a place to go, to talk, maybe share a bag of potato chips, slouch down in the seats, complain about school, discuss a movie we had just seen, relax, put our feet out the windows, open both doors like they were wings of a plane; the car became a sort of clubhouse.  

Other kids probably used it as well, and maybe a homeless person or two.  We'd find beer bottles inside, and candy wrappers.  No one ever damaged it though beyond the damage the rust and elements were doing.  No one stole the handles or the windshield wipers, not that they would be of much use to anyone in 1952. We tried to get the trunk open but were never successful.  We did get the hood up revealing a large engine block with broken wires, a missing carburetor and broken hoses.  We didn't care. The car ran fine for us.

Then, one day, heading into the field, we immediately realized something was wrong. Instead of the car, there was just a brown area of dead grass and weeds.  "Someone stole our car!" Charlie yelled. We loved coming here and now our car was probably in some junkyard or scrap heap. Even worse, it may have been flattened into a metal pancake. No matter its fate, our car was gone for good. There were others. In Hyde Park some friends and I came upon an abandoned car deep in the woods but it was so badly rusted no one wanted to get inside. None of them ever measured up to our Ford.

Roger was not immune to the kinds of adventures I got involved in with Johnny or Charlie.  One afternoon we were up on the top floor of his place, an attic maybe, or storage space. We discovered a couple of stacks of old 78 records.  LP or long playing 33 1/3 records were just being introduced. Even though the 78s were playable on most record players of the time, their boxed-in sound and short playing time were no match for the "HiFi" sound and twenty minute playing time per side of the new LPs.  So many people took their old 78s and stored them away.

I suppose if we had a record player available or perhaps if the records contained something we were interested in, not opera, not classical, not jazz, not Doris Day, maybe marches or something, we might not have done with them what we did. Outside the window, down below, was the Mendell School driveway.  We both agreed. Let's take a stack of these 78s and sail them into the school driveway below.

What!  Were we crazy?  No, just kids getting caught up in the moment.  I'm not even sure when the idea to skim them out the window came to us.  We must have looked through them, got bored fast, maybe tossed one or two at each other and then decided to make them really fly.

It was spectacular. The records were likely made of shellac considering how they shattered into a million pieces when they crashed into the driveway below. That was the real reason for sailing them out the window.  To watch them explode into smithereens on that driveway.  It was like a David Letterman bit. They were already brittle, some even broken in half when we pulled them out of their paper sleeves.  Roger would set a stack on the window sill. We would take turns tossing them in the general direction of the school. They would glide gracefully for a moment and then plummet, exploding into shards as they struck the school parking area.  A couple even floated, undulating uneasily before somehow landing unbroken. A few caught some air, flew up, crashing against the brick wall of the school itself. How did we avoid breaking any school windows? There were huge ones on that side of the school. Just lucky.  Each splintering collision elicited from us loud yells and cheers.  Yeah, kids that age can be so destructive.  To anyone down below in the driveway it would have seemed like a manic invasion of flying saucers.  Of course, anyone down below would have been cut to ribbons by the exploding bits of record shrapnel.

After a few minutes of crazy exhilaration one of us got the idea to try for the set of stairs which led to the school basement.  Now we aimed more carefully anticipating who would be the first to sail one of our flying 78's right down that dark set of stairs. A few of them did disappear down the stairwell but since we couldn't see them explode down there we soon got tired of trying.  After about 15 minutes of this, the stack of records was depleted, the area below littered with the broken remnants of those operas and jazz and Doris Day.  

The craziest thing was the aftermath. There wasn't any.  Did we get into trouble?  "Hey, if you do that you're gonna get in trouble," was a classic refrain in our group. Someone must have screamed at us Roger's mother, whoever owned the records, someone from the school, a janitor? Who cleaned up the mess we made below?  Where are the old photos when you need them?  

All I know is that it was fun, it was exhilarating and somehow we got away with it. 

Occasionally Johnny and I would be below Boylston Street down by Germania, most likely on the way to my grandmother's.  There was a brewery there, Pickwick Ale, an enormous brick building that had been making beer for decades.  I remember stacks of barrels, and the smell, sort of a sour, yeasty, all pervasive aroma. Johnny used to stagger around when we walked by.  "I'm drunk," he'd say. (Again, how did we know what drunk was? TV? Some relative? Yet, there we were, mimicking drunks.) The beer place was interesting but I only mention it because this is where I first heard the Shut Up/Trouble joke.  

"OK," Johnny began. "There are two friends, one is named Shut Up and the other is named Trouble.  So, one day Trouble gets lost. Shut Up looks all over the place but can't find him.  So he sits down on the curb.  A cop comes over.   'Hey, kid, what's your name?'  'Shut Up.'  The cops gets all mad.  'I said what's your name?'  'I told you. Shut Up.'  So the cop says, 'Are you looking for Trouble?'  'Yeah, yeah.  Do you know where he is?'"   Well, sad as it may seem now, I thought that was hysterical.  

Whether it was the play on words, talking that way to authority figures, saying one thing that means another, I don't know.  It was just funny. It became the standard joke between us.  Sometimes a third character would get involved. Stupid. After the cop keeps asking Shut Up his name, the cop turns to this third kid, Stupid, and asks, "Is your friend stupid?"  The friend responds, "No, I am."  What's stupid is the joke and everyone should shut up telling it or they are going to be in trouble.  At seven, though, I couldn't get enough of it.  (This is before I even heard of Abbot and Costello who specialized in this sort of convoluted word play.)

Kids don't need very much to amuse them.  For me, just being outside was enough. There was a set of garages across from where we lived on Adams Circle. Sometimes Johnny and I would find one of them open, usually when someone took their car out and neglected to close the door.  These were not modern garage doors but barn-type doors, one on each side, on hinges. You had to close (and open) them by getting out of your car. No garage door openers allowed. People who rented them didn't bother closing them once they drove out, especially in summer.

Johnny and I would go inside an open one, look at stuff, a pile of magazines, an old rusty bike, anything that might be interesting.  Once we found an old calendar, the type with young women, barely dressed, standing in front of cars, a little grease artfully decorating their pretty noses, holding tools, all very foolish to us.  "She doesn't know how to fix that car," Johnny would say.

There was an empty lot next to the garage, grass and weeds.  It ran up against a chain link fence, maybe three or four feet tall.  Behind the fence was some sort of play area, day care maybe or some sort of private school.  Sometimes when Johnny and I were playing in the lot there'd be kids on the other side of the fence.  Kids our age. We'd walk over, sit in front of the fence and watch them. There was no communication. Most of the kids on the other side would ignore us, a few would come over and stare back at us. I think we found it odd that kids would be playing behind a fence.  Fences in our lives were not barriers, but things to climb over or get around.  But these kids seemed perfectly happily playing in their fence-defined space.  It may say something about my then undiagnosed feelings of anxiety over being in confined spaces that even an enclosed space I wasn't part of, like that play area, made me uneasy.  It could be why I liked being outside, roaming, moving, continually defining my own space.  Such introspective thoughts were some years away.  Soon boredom set in. We had other things to do in the lot. Like find the devil's horn.

I don't really know where this minor obsession came from.  Religion was heavy-duty in Jamaica Plain in those days, mostly Catholic, mostly dogmatic, a large part of people's social lives.  Someone convinced me, likely Johnny, that if you dug a hole in the ground you'd uncover the horns the devil had on his head.  What!  We all knew that if you dug deep enough you would come to China, but everyone also knew no one could dig that deep. The horns were a different matter.  "They aren't that deep," other kids would relate.  I mean, how did they know how deep they were?  Besides, what if I did find them?  Wouldn't I also find the devil on whose head the horns were attached?  Then what would I do?  Probably run like hell.

However, questions of logic did not interfere with my search.  For a brief period I was determined to find them.  Johnny and I would find a sharp stick or the occasional trowel or some usually dull tool to start digging holes in that lot next to the garages.  Crazy but it was always that lot.  The holes we dug were no more than six to eight inches deep.  "I can't find anything!" one of us would yell before starting another hole usually right next to the one we had just dug. 

"I found them!" Johnny would sometimes yell.  No, just another rock.  Sometimes we'd find an old can or a bone some dog had been chewing on.  Never the devil. Thinking of it now, that was a good thing.

Most of the things my friends and I did were relatively safe, maybe a scrape from a fall out of a tree. Then there were the places we'd go that had a higher element of danger.

I've mentioned the train tracks down on Armory Street, above the street, running between the granite block walls.  There were stairs leading up to the tracks, stairs commuters used to climb when there were stations up there for the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad. In 1953 when Johnny and I would explore, the passenger trains that would whiz by were heading for Boston's South Station. The time had passed when they would stop in Jamaica Plain or Roxbury. 

Other kids told us about the coal yards up there.  The trains that sped by were diesel or electric so the coal bins were left over from the days of boilers and steam.  We wanted to see for ourselves.

I am thinking now two sets of tracks, maybe three.  To get to the old coal bins you had to cross the tracks.  We knew we had to take the passing trains seriously (yet we couldn't wait until one of them roared by) so we kept warning each other to be careful. Johnny described to me how "squashed" I'd be if I got hit by one.  It certainly was no place for a couple of kids.

To us, though, it wasn't so much dangerous as it was exciting.  Danger was something I avoided.  I could tell if something were dangerous because if something frightened me I avoided it.  Being up there above the street was like being in another world. The granite wall extended above the tracks; that was our safety zone. We'd run over to a track and put something on it, a coin, a stick, some small bit of debris.  Then we'd run back to the wall to wait for a train.  You could hear them coming before you'd see them.  There were no stops so by the time they passed they were going at a good clip.  Silver passenger trains pulled by a large noisy diesel engine.  A kid's dream machine. It went by like a bullet or as Johnny put it, "That is driving fast."

Driving so fast, we had been told by other kids, that if you didn't press yourself tightly to the wall when it went by you could be sucked under the wheels.  Yikes.  Seeing the trains speed by was worth the risk, we obviously thought.  In the distance you could hear a train approaching, maybe the blast of a whistle.  Faster and faster, closer and closer.  I'd hug that wall for dear life. The train would shoot by.  We'd run over to the track to find our coin or whatever.  Most of the time it had been flung off the track but occasionally a flattened penny would still be there.  We'd take it back to the wall, pass it back and forth, study it, see if you could still flip it.  Johnny would talk about trying to buy penny candy with it.  "Is it still worth a penny?" he would wonder.  We were like a couple of scientists and the train tracks were our laboratory.

Putting stuff on the tracks was fun.  Exploring the coal bins was even better.  And a lot dirtier.  Have I mentioned dangerous? 

The coal storage hoppers were large hoppers, maybe 20 to 30 feet deep, where coal was piled before diesel fuel.  There were four or five of the hoppers, all in various stages of falling apart.  Some had shed-like roofs, others were open to the air.  Mostly they were empty or partly filled with dirty water.  To get from one side to another we'd take some of the strewn-about boards, lay them across the opening and then balance walk across. Risky but even though we were young and reckless we were also young and agile.  

We also searched for coal.  Now I knew what coal was.  I used to watch the coal delivery truck set up a metal chute to slide coal down through a cellar window at my house on Adams Circle into a small room near the furnace.  Sometimes I'd go down there to watch my father shovel it into the furnace.  He'd open a small door through which I could see blue and yellow flames.  I loved that.  Probably a little more than he liked keeping that furnace going all winter. Still, the furnace had to be fed day and night so there were times when my mother, too, would have to come down to shovel coal.

The coal we found at the tracks was glassy, somewhat soft.  We'd play catch with it a few minutes before tossing it down one of the bins into the black water.  Sometimes, if we found a good enough surface, we'd write our names using the coal as a somewhat unwieldy black crayon.

There was one Saturday, late summer, early fall, when we were having so much fun at the tracks that we lost track (pun intended) of the time.  It was beginning to get dark when we realized we had better get home.  Suppertime had come and gone. In our neighborhood there were always adults yelling "Supper's ready," about 5 o'clock.  Well, if someone were yelling that for our benefit, we certainly didn't hear it where we were.

When I finally got home about 7 o'clock, filthy from the tracks, my mother was more relieved than mad. I was admonished never to go near the tracks again.  I don't think I ever did.  As my mother began to fill the bathtub, she told me, "You know that I had Daddy out looking for you!" My older brother was outside the bathroom door yelling that he wanted to see how black the water got in the tub after I had scrubbed off all the dirt.  

Later, in my pajamas, having a sandwich for supper, I felt warm and cozy and safe on the living room couch watching an episode of The Lone Ranger. The bathtub water had become appropriately dark enough to satisfy my brother, but I also felt satisfied.  Another day with my friends had ended with no harm done.  I'd see them again tomorrow.  We'd talk all about the fun we had had at the tracks, over and over, exaggerating, boasting, the trains going "over a hundred miles an hour, really!" "Billy put a dead rat on the tracks." Not really. The day would take on a mythical quality.  

Those childhood times still have a special resonance.  I was becoming socialized.  I was learning how to get along with people.  I realized that being with other people was often better than being by yourself.  I don't know how you fared in this world, Johnny, where you are now Roger and Charlie, but the times I shared with you those years ago continue to be significant and meaningful.