Bad Boys

                                           

Bill

The section of Hyde Park where I grew up in the 50s was right on the Milton town line. Milton was a small, rich, secluded community, very different from the more blue collar Hyde Park. We lived on top of Fairmount Hill on Prospect Street. Walk down one side of the hill and you’d come to the school I went to, the library, the Neponset River, railroad tracks, and all the stores at Cleary Square. 

I liked Cleary Square. It seemed always busy and noisy. I’d visit the five and dimes, sometimes with a whole quarter in hand.  It’s where the movie theatre was, where I’d take a bus into Boston with my mother and brother, sit still for a haircut, try on shoes at the Thom McAn’s, even start an account at the Hyde Park Savings Bank.

The town of Milton bordered our back yard.  Step into the woods behind our house and I was in Milton.  Milton was quite a contrast to the Cleary Square side of the hill. Walk down the Milton side of Fairmount Hill, you’d come to Brush Hill Road which ran through the western edge of Milton. The Milton behind my house was a different world than Cleary Square. It was an area of large estates, we kids called them “mansions”, sometimes even using the word “castle” to describe these enormous houses with their long driveways, acres of manicured lawns with surrounding woods and fields.

It was quiet too.  There were times I’d walk or bike along Brush Hill Road without a car going by.  Sometimes you’d hear the sound of a distant lawnmower which only added to the feeling of solitude.  I liked that feeling during the daytime.  I liked the trees and fields, the distant views of the Blue Hills. But at night walking along Brush Hill Road up Fairmount Avenue to Prospect Street was a dark passage for me, mysterious and provocative in summer, spooky and remote in winter.

The darkness dominates in spite of the street lights and the incandescent glow from within the houses themselves. As I walk I’m hoping for a car to go by just to light my path with a quick snatch of light.  The large yards, woods and fields that fill the spaces between houses look peaceful and bucolic during the day; at night the light from the houses and street lights is cut off, isolated, almost swallowed up by all that darkness in between. Even though the walk from Brush Hill along Fairmount up to Prospect Street isn’t very far, it was different at night. Especially if I begin to hear things that shouldn’t be there or see things that can’t be there. Is that a loud bird or the shriek of…something else?  Is something coming out of the ground in that field across the street or it just a bush?  

I try to move as quickly as I can in the dark spaces between the street lights. Brighter and brighter as I approach a street light, brightest beneath it.  I should just stop here.  But it’s so bright I can’t see if something is coming for me just out there in the dark.  So the dark envelops me again as I quickly move to the next pool of light.

Reece’s house is at the half way point. Before I get there I have to maneuver through the  deep black void on both sides of the street. Forms I can't quite make out at night are the trees I climb during the day. The slowly moving wave just against the sky is the tall grass I play in when it's sunny.  I just keep walking. 

The Reeces had a large yard, a long driveway, all dark. Just a few lights on in their house.  Behind their house were the woods that fronted the street.  Another dark place to walk by.

Tough to see in the dark.  Even the enormous trees add to the mood, their irregular branches, dark and stiff above me, blocking out the tranquil stars and slivering the light of the moon so only a flash or two lights the street.

Then there were the dogs.  Most of these estates had dogs, large dogs, usually in pairs.  I thought of them as guard dogs. The owners would want their dogs to bark as an alarm if someone were on their property. A way to frighten an intruder away.  Sounds reasonable.  But what if the dogs think I’m an intruder even if I’m innocently walking by on the street?

Is that a dog barking in the distance?  I’m walking by Reeces’ house now.  I know they have dogs.  So do the Boyles'. Their estate is just on the other side of the Reeces. The Boyles’ dogs are dobermans.  

Walking up Fairmount Avenue, I was always wary that a couple of those dogs might be out on nightly reconnaissance, crouched nearby, sniffing the air, hearing my foot steps, waiting for me to get closer, prepared to come running out at me, exercising their dog-given right to ferociously defend their property, even extending that right to the public street.  I always moved a little faster passing the Reeces.

By the time I got close to Prospect Street, I’d be walking by the houses where my little brother’s friends lived. Here’s Johnny’s house. That’s where Paul lives. Josh is on the corner of Fairmount and Prospect. I’m almost home. I can relax, calmed by the familiarity. Here is where I live, where I belong. Lots of light. Now I’m walking under the canopy of maple trees that line one side of my street. We rake those leaves in the fall, put out the trash barrels next to them, watched from our living room window as they withstood hurricanes and blizzards. Our own guardians along the street.  And they do not bite.

The families who lived just down from us on Brush Hill Road preferred their isolated environment. The amount of land, the trees, the long driveways, helped insure their insularity. That same isolation made them vulnerable to burglars, or as I called them, robbers, along with vandals. I should know.  During my skulking, predatory, trying-hard-to-be-a-bad-kid phase, I inflicted some minor damage on a couple of those places.

In spite of my misgivings at night, the area threaded by Brush Hill Road drew me. I liked the wide open spaces. Fields filled with tall grass, green and wet after a summer shower, brown and dry and wind-swept in winter. There were sprawling lawns to play on, hills and berms to run up and roll down.  I loved getting shot with a cap gun, making a wild leap down the incline of a side lawn before rolling up to an old garden fence, dead!  We also climbed the trees trying to go as high as we could. The trees became monkey bars, especially the spruce and pine, the cedars and beeches.

A friend and I would cross the small two-lane winding country road that was Brush Hill to transcend our environment of modest houses, small yards and forsythia bushes to this other one that featured wide lawns, flower gardens, sculptured shrubs, tall-grass fields, and so much blue sky. Further on there’d be other unique places to explore: a small woods with birches and twisted apple trees, a miniature wetland with tussocks of grass, or a place with a small brook running along a long-forgotten fence.  It was a paradise to my young self.

The way to maneuver most easily among the varied habitats in Milton was to get to know the kids who lived in those houses.  This gave you an implied right of passage.  You had to walk up to a kids’ back door in order to know if he could come out to play. If no one was home you might still play around his house.  If the local Milton cops happened to show up, “Hey, kid, you’re in big trouble.  You’re trespassing,” I’d just twist my already young sweet face into a mask of surprise and innocence.  “Oh, I just live over there.  My friend Frankie told me to wait in his yard for him. What, he’s not home?” 

All I’d get is an admonishment not to play there when my friend wasn’t there.  What they didn’t know is I may have just carved my initials on one of the nearby trees or in some rough house game knocked over the statue of a cherub in the flower garden. Most of the time if I saw the cop car or some adult I didn’t know I’d take off into the woods.

There were other reasons to get to know these kids.  They knew the secret places you didn’t, the hidden stream, the best tree to climb, a good place for shade on an unbearable August afternoon. You’d be invited into their kitchens for a glass of water or even lemonade from the refrigerator.  You’d play on their porches or in their garages.

One of the best reasons to get to know my rich neighbors was to get over my fear of their dogs.  If I could pet them as a friend of their masters then maybe they wouldn't chase me when I was alone. That was the theory at least. And there were a lot of dogs in Milton.  Not the kind that you carry around today in a purse.  Big dogs.  Loud dogs.  Dogs that would come after you.  Dogs with teeth.  Dogs with attitude.  Among them I had to make as many friends as I could.

It’s a summer morning.  I’m heading through my back woods to the Reeces’ house. Frankie and his younger brother, Ned.  No sign of their dogs. Not yet. I’m wary though. I always try to have a plan. There’s a garage just  to the side of their house. The back of the garage slopes almost all the way to the ground so it’ll be easy enough to jump onto the roof if I suspect one of the dogs is about.  

It was very important to be with the kids who lived in the house before the dogs showed up.  Once I’m playing, all the dogs will do is run over, bark a bit, sniff a bit, lose interest and wander off. Sometimes Frankie liked to intimidate me with the dogs.  If we got into an argument he’d command one of the dogs to “chew Billy’s arm.” “Bite him!” he’d yell. The dog was smarter than Frankie.  He’d look around, smell me, shake his head as if indicating he had no interest in biting anything. As the dog ran off, Frankie would knock me down and pummel me.

When the Reeces weren’t home and I wanted to cross through their yard to get down to the fields below, I had to keep a sharp eye out.  I’d come out of the woods from behind my house, walk quietly to the back of the Reeces’ garage, stop and listen.  I’d walk down away from the house toward the street but still in their yard.  There were the dogs, up by the front of the house.  I’d stay low and keep moving.  If they spotted me it was an all out bolt to the edge of the yard and the safety of the field behind.  The dogs were territorial and didn’t usually follow me beyond the confines of their space.  Otherwise I would have had a number of chew marks on various parts of my body.  That’s what I thought anyway.  But, then again, the Reeces’ pets were Irish setters.  Perhaps more blustery when attacking than damage inflicting.  Joey Boyle’s dogs were an entirely different kind of animal.  Dobermans.

Joey’s yard, I mean that in the Milton meaning of the word, was made up of fields, woods and lawn. One side was adjacent to the Reece’s property while the front went all the way down to Brush Hill Road.  Of the several places in Milton I had friends, his was the biggest.  A driveway up from Brush Hill Road led to a large paved parking area in front of the Boyles’ house, a once stately mansion now beginning to show its age. The house was built in 1880 as a summer home offering views of the Blue Hills.  It’s gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted of Franklin Park and Central Park fame.  The original owner was a friend of Woodrow Wilson advising his administration on matters of foreign trade.  There was even a story that Wilson visited the house during the days he was working to establish the League of Nations. 

Now it was Joey’s place. He and his sisters had the run of it.  I got to know Joey from the occasional appearances he’d make when Gene and I were playing our games in Gene’s yard which ran adjacent to the the Boyle woods.  Joey would appear out of the woods, see what we were doing, participate a bit and then he was gone.  “Where’d Joey go?” I can remember kids saying.  Back into the woods.  “Back to his creepy old house,” someone would yell.

After Gene moved, I began to go over to Joey’s house to see if he were home and wanted to play.  I didn’t cut through his woods and across the grassy fields surrounding his house. That was dangerous with his dogs lurking.  Next to Gene’s house, on the way up Prospect Street, was another house, large, brick. Adjacent to it was a dirt driveway that allowed the Boyle’s access to Prospect Street.

To get to Joey’s I’d walk up that dirt driveway until I came to a large building.  This wasn’t his house.  It was a carriage house on the edge of his property.  It was surrounded by a large paved area across from which was the main house. Most of the time Joey or one of his sisters was out front so I felt safe walking over to them.

There was this one time (not at band camp) when I came down the dirt driveway to find the front of his house empty.  No kids.  Just the peaceful quiet of a warm summer morning.  Then I saw them, the two dobermans, lying together near the front door.  Before I could back up to hide behind the carriage house, they spotted me.  Both of the dogs’tapered heads popped up at once, swiveled toward me in the most menacing way possible and stared. Time stopped.  Nothing moved.  Then the dogs bolted. 

I’ve never seen dogs run so fast.  They were greyhounds. I was the rabbit. They were wolves. I was the lamb. I couldn’t move. I dropped my hands to my sides showing my complete vulnerability. If the dogs were horses they would be at full gallop.  I was about to be torn apart.

Suddenly they slowed down, ran past me, circled and ran back to the front of their house. Joey’s older brother, Johnny, hearing the commotion, the dogs’ barking and likely my screams, had run out and called them off. For years I admired him.  What power to have within your control two of the most frightening creatures in all the neighborhood.

Joey came out, one of his sisters.  She started to roughhouse with one of the same demon dogs that had just tried to eat me.  “Pet him!” she demanded.  His head was very hard, all bone, his sides and back all muscle, his breathing coming fast after his earlier death run.  He opened his mouth, ran his tongue along his teeth, huge canines, and then plopped back down on the driveway as if nothing had happened.  If someone had petted me they would have found wet hair, a racing heart and a trembling body.  

Every once in a while I had an urge to climb trees. On the edge of Gene’s yard, just on the border of Joey’s woods, there were a number of great climbing trees, spruce, branches arranged almost like a ladder so you could get a foot from one branch to another easily and quickly.  You’d ascend about 90 feet to great views of the Blue Hills, the top of Gene’s house, all the yards and woods and fields that surrounded and filled the neighborhood.

That was fun, except for meeting up with the dobermans.  They would sometimes prowl the woods looking for small dinosaurs to kill so I had to be careful. Rumor was more than one small neighborhood dog had been mauled by the dobermans. No kids though but not from lack of trying.  A few times they spotted me in those woods. I think they found it amusing to tree me. Hearing them racing through the tall grass, I’d make a mad dash to a nearby climbing tree, grab onto the highest branch I could reach and swing myself up before they got to me.  I’d look down from a safe height, through a maze of limbs and branches, to see them with their paws up on the trunk, mouths open, tongues hanging out.  They’d circle the tree a few times just to make sure I’d stay put before running off through the fields back to their house. It was just a game to them.  Tree the kid.  They won every time. 

I’d wait a while. Then climb back down making a quick exit into my own woods or Gene’s yard.  But I liked the view from those trees and I liked woods so I’d return, always on the alert but rewarded by my place up in the sky, nudged in between several branches, away from everyone, especially the two nastiest members of the Boyle family.

Richie Gobi was not a rich kid.  He lived just around the corner from me on Warren Avenue in a modest house with all his brothers and sisters. Yeah, the same Gobi brood who terrorized the neighborhood when we first moved to Hyde Park a few years ago.  Things had settled down since.

I got to know Richie from seeing him on the street, talking to him. We got to be friends.

Richie’s family had the occasional dog, very small, puppies actually.  The family was a rough and tumble crew so I don’t think the dogs fared that well.  The only thing any of those dogs did to me was crave attention and drool on my shoes.

These then were the bad boys and their dogs.  When Gene moved away in the summer of 1955, I felt lost.  I knew Joey and Frankie and saw Richie on the street but I didn’t have much to do with them.  Gene was my best friend those first few years living on the hill.  My world took a hit the summer he moved.  I slowly began to drift in a different direction.

What today is called “hanging out” might then have been called “getting into trouble.”  Joey, Frankie, Richie.  We weren’t a gang.  Rarely did I play with them together. They weren’t friends with each other.  I was the common factor. I’d walk over to the Reeces’ house if I heard one of them outside.  I’d go up to Richie’s house to see if he were home.  As for Joey I’d try to call him first on the phone.  I’d want someone to be outside to control his dogs before walking down his dirt driveway.

During those years, ’55, ’56, ’57, these were the kids I played with.  For good or bad.

It’s an August day, late morning, hot and humid already.  I’m walking along the dirt driveway to Joey’s house. The trees looked wilted.  The grass along the edges of the driveway is brown and spindly.  Walking by the carriage house I spot Joey and two of his sisters, Valerie and Priscilla, over by the front of their house.  The girls have lovely, old-world names. One of them has long red hair.  Priscilla is holding a large insecticide sprayer, a cylindrical tube with a push plunger at one end and a container attached to the other end.  “I’m killing bugs,” she says.  Inside the container is DDT.

She draws the handle back and with a healthy thrust pushes the plunger forward.  There is a whooshing sound as air is forced through the cylinder. Then a spurt as a cloud of DDT sprays out the other end.

That moment is almost like a dream. Surreal. Then and now. The cloud of tiny droplets slowly coalesces in the hot humid air. Not going up or down, or expanding.  Another push.  Another cloud of DDT intermingles with the first. I’m fascinated by this. The droplets are like tiny planets revolving haphazardly around each other. There is not even a wisp of a breeze to disturb this tiny universe in front of me.   I recall that moment vividly after so many years. It reflected where I was then.  I’m standing outside this enormous house with kids I didn’t even know existed a short time ago.  The sprayer and the spray, the heat, the sounds and the lack of sounds, all bring back this memory, this fleeting moment, delicate like the ethereal cloud of DDT suspended in front of me. 

The reality is a group of kids outside on a hot day under the shade of a large tree, the air around us saturated with poison.  Pris isn’t trying to kill bugs.  The sprayer is a toy to her.  She just likes making clouds. 

Then someone yells. “Not on me.” It’s Joey. Pris has aimed the sprayer at him.  Maybe an ant is climbing up his sleeve?  His shirt is wet. 

I don’t know if Joey and his sisters were physically abused but unlike Gene and me, they were neglected.  Just like Richie was neglected. Talk among the kids in the neighborhood was Joey’s father was a member of the Mafia.  Except being Irish, he’d likely have been part of the South Boston Irish Mob, the one Whitey Bulger eventually took over. Someone told me he was a bookie.  All I could picture was someone reading in a library.  Suffice to say I rarely saw either parent. The kids seemed to have the run of their house.  Doors to the outside were always left open. If someone got hungry they’d run off to the kitchen, make some sort of a sandwich from baloney that had been left on the counter from a previous meal.  There was a carelessness to their lives, an aimlessness.

But that is the adult in me looking back many years.  Standing next to Priscilla as she sprayed us all with DDT, I was absorbed by her energy, her ability to do anything she wanted whenever she wanted. Maybe she had ice cream for breakfast or stayed up until midnight.  Or didn’t sleep at all. She and her siblings’ lack of supervision I took for freedom.  And I envied it.

In those enormous spaces around those Milton mansions, there was a lot of room in which to move.  That may be one definition of freedom.  There were no fences.  We could go off in any direction. Once we reached the woods behind Joey’s house there was nothing to prevent the two of us from crossing through Gene’s yard and then into the woods behind my house to my yard and out to Prospect Street.  If a kid we knew came by on his bike we’d hop on his fender for a brief ride. If someone had a ball we’d toss it around.  We were always on the move.  Always looking for the next thing to do.  

We’d run through the fields of grass around Joey's house all the way down to Brush Hill Road where there was more woods and more fields, and more sky.  It seems they only direction we couldn’t easily get to was up.  Then again we did have the trees for that.

There were never any formal games with Joey, no “plays” as with Gene. We’d run around in the grass making paths.  Sometimes we’d mash the grass down in a square which would become a fort, the tall grass around it full of wild animals or Indians.

We were prepared for any kind of attack.  After all we had cap guns. Most kids’ cap guns resembled the revolvers from TV and movie westerns.  Six-shooters.  The problem with those toy guns is that they rarely worked. We used perforated roll caps for ammunition.  They came in sets of five rolls, on red paper, in a little box.  You’d pull apart the top roll from the one below it, and load it into your pistol threading it so the first cap would be opposite the gun’s hammer.  When you pulled the trigger the hammer would slam on the cap producing a sharp bang and lots of smoke.  Then the next cap would automatically rotate into place.  That was the theory.

We seemed to spend a lot of time in those grass forts maintaining those guns.  The cap roll would get jammed inside the gun.  The caps wouldn’t fire. Or they might fire once or twice and then nothing for the next several pulls of the trigger.  This was not sophisticated weaponry.

Except for my space gun.  It was a cap gun but looked nothing like the Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy western models most kids had.  It was red plastic in the shape of a space ship, a space ship that shot caps.  I never had to open it to load the caps. The plastic on half the side was missing, broken off.  It only made the gun more exciting.  I think I may have found it in someone’s trash can. You loaded a roll of caps, pulled the trigger and time after time it was all noise and smoke.  And it was loud.  Broken, abused but well-designed.  There were times there was so much smoke I couldn’t see in front of me.  I wonder how much of that smoke made it into my lungs.  It was a great smell, like the smell of gasoline.  Cap smoke was potassium, sulfur and antimony.  Likely sold by the same people who later sold kids bags of broken glass.

But toy safety provisions were a long way off.  If you were a witness then to our games standing on the edge of Joey’s field, you’d hear kids yelling, you’d see the grass bend and then spring up as we ran, and you’d hear the crisp bang of cap guns along with the occasional, “Wait.  My gun isn’t working again.” Wisps of acrid smoke would reach your nose as the battle in the grass continued to the woods.  If there were enough kids and enough working guns, the commotion would start the dogs running and barking.  Dogs did not like cap guns.  Most of these shoot outs would end up in pandemonium.  Flashes, bursts of three or four caps going off at once, blue smoke, kids yelling, guns misfiring, dogs barking.  Pandemonium.  But so much fun.

We’d get very thirsty after one of these cap fights.  I  preferred water which I would pour into a glass standing in front of the sink inside Joey’s large kitchen.  It wasn’t as modern as 1955 would allow. More like a decade earlier with a large deep sink, tile counters, large wooden cabinets, a kitchen table overrun with papers and kids’ toys and half-eaten food.

I never went upstairs in that house, or even to Joey’s room.  We did spend some time in a living area just off the front door. Joey had a color television.  It didn’t work too well, reds were somewhat green, the picture a bit smeared, the signal coming from a roof antenna that may have been twisted on its side.  But it was color and the screen size was easily twice what I had at home.  We’d watch anything if it were in color. Once I was in there with Joey, his sisters, some other kids, when one of the dobermans trotted in, went to a corner of the rug, squatted and did an enormous amount of business right on the floor.  No one seemed to notice. The dog ran off. The color TV ran on.  It was that kind of house.  

With the doors always open in the summer quite a few bugs would fly or walk in.  Maybe that was the real reason for the DDT sprayer. I did not like bugs.  Sometimes my reasons were good.  A bee sting could be deadly.  I knew how nasty red ant bites were. Running through a spider web would always have me flaying my hands about trying to get the spider off, whether there was one on me or not.

I did get bitten.  Lots of honey bees nested in these woods and fields. There’d be a red welt.  Calamine might be used.  I always got a perverse sense of pleasure as a kid when I learned that after stinging me the bee responsible would die, it’s stinger in me the death of it.  

I liked the outdoors in spite of such perceived dangers.  It was a playground.  And for most of my friends, the boys anyway, it was also an outdoor bathroom.  Joey thought nothing of suddenly stopping what he was doing, unbuttoning his pants and taking a leak in front of me or whoever else was around.  Nothing particularly unusual about this, all the boys did it, sometimes they’d be three or four kids in a line, all peeing.  It’s as if when one started, there was a shared need for everyone else to join in.  Except for me.  I was fine relieving myself outside if I were alone but I never liked it if someone else were standing next to me.  So I’d wait, stand nearby, try to act casual, while Joey or Richie watered the grass. I don’t think anyone else noticed. Taking a leak was something you tolerated, something you did quickly.  After all it was interrupting your fun.

Joey was a daredevil. I wasn’t. There was a shed in the field below Reeces’ yard.  A small building.  We used to dig in the ground around it looking for “meteorites,” really pieces of cinder from someone’s coal furnace. But we liked finding them.  Sometimes Joey would climb a nearby tree and swing over to the roof of the shed.  It had a slanted roof, the low end maybe fifteen to twenty feet from the ground.  “C’mon, Billy,” he’d shout, “C’mon up.”  I really didn’t want to.  I knew once I was up there I’d have to jump off.

I’d done it a few times.  The ground below wasn’t flat.  It went up at an angle.  You couldn’t jump and then roll because of the incline. I was always afraid I’d bang my knee into my chin.  But once I was on the roof I knew the only way down was to jump.  Joey would go first.  He’d make it look easy, screaming as he ran off the roof, always landing smoothly.  I’d walk over to the edge, try to figure out how far to jump, walk to the middle of the roof, think about it too long, walk back to the edge, more calculating.  

Joey, meanwhile, would be below me getting bored.  “C’mon, jump.”  I just stood there.  “It’s not that far.  Jump.”  Again, indecision from the kid up on the roof.  Joey would plead, “Just jump.”  He’d cajole, “It is so easy.”  And threaten, “I’m gonna go home then.”  Finally I’d jump.  Not a running jump.  I’d just jump from the edge.  And more often than not I would hit my chin with my knee.

Most of us kids had some money in our pockets, usually some pennies, couple of nickels, a dime, occasionally a quarter.  Joey had paper. Dollar bills. Five dollar bills. That’s why I thought his family was rich. Millionaires. To me that was as rich as you could possibly be. Luckily for my teeth there weren’t any corner stores on on our corners.  You’d have to go down to the variety store on Truman Highway or the mom and pop store by the Fairmount School.  But when we did go, Joey showed he was a generous kid.  He’d buy us sodas, big (five cent) candy bars, even a large bag of potato chips.  And paying with a buck, he’d get change back.

The Reece’s had money too. Their grandfather had invented a button hole machine for shoes later adapted for clothing. I got to know them from playing in the woods just behind my house.  The Reeces owned the woods. That never stopped us from playing in there, making forts or just climbing the trees.  There were paths, one leading to an enormous beech tree close to the sloped roof of Reece’s garage.  It’s likely I was playing there when one or the other of the Reece boys came back to see who was up in their tree.

If memory serves, Frankie was the oldest, Ned the youngest.  I was about Frankie’s age. Playing with the Reeces was infrequent. I didn’t like to walk over to their house because of the dogs.  I didn’t especially like Frankie. Ned was fine but Frankie was a bit of a bully.  That was my impression.  He seemed bored by me.  I wasn’t adventuresome enough.  I was afraid of his dogs.  If I climbed a tree he’d have to climb higher than me and let me know it. 

We didn’t play cap gun games.  Instead we’d get an entire roll of caps to see what would happen if we smacked the whole roll with a brick.  The Reeces had the remains of a small building at the corner of their property out by Fairmount Avenue.  It was two brick walls at right angles to each other but in earlier times it might have been a sitting area or maybe a storage building. There was a wooden door with a rounded top at the corner facing the street. I always wondered about that door.  Was there an inside to this structure or was it just there for effect. Over the years I’d walk or ride my bike by trying to picture in my head what it might have looked like thirty or even fifty years ago.

Frankie didn’t have such thoughts.  We went down there to find some loose bricks to slam onto the roll of caps.  Every once in a while you’d get a satisfactory bang and a lot of smoke. Usually though only a few caps would go off leaving you with a smashed roll that would no longer fit into a cap gun. 

The Reece’s house did bring out the bad boy in me.  Especially when the family was away. Bored on a hot summer’s day, I’d walk into the woods, listen by the garage, determine no one was home, especially the dogs, and then have their yard to myself.  I thought of it as my own place.  I’d climb a tree, walk down by the old brick structure, or even just lie on his lawn to look up at the sky.

I also knew how to get into the house.  Frankie had shown me how  to climb a tree to get on to one of the porch roofs.  Up by the end of the roof was a window to an upstairs room  On several occasions I’d get on the roof and then walk over to the window.  At first it was just to look in.  Then I had  another idea.

There is no one around.  I look over to my back woods, and over into Joey’s. It’s quiet except for a squirrel running along the branch of a nearby tree. In the distance I can hear a pair of crows conversing. I sit there for a while in the corner of the roof.  No one knows I’m here. It’s my own little spot. I can come up here whenever the Reeces aren’t home. I’m not doing any harm. Not yet.

I look through the window.  A bedroom?  A den?  I should leave now.  I don’t.  Instead I try the window.  It won’t open.  It’s locked. Having been up here before, this day I came prepared. I have a small hammer.  I tap on the pane of glass by the window lock.  It cracks.  I tap again.  A piece of glass falls into the room.  I freeze.  What a lot of noise. Moments pass. I tap again.  I’m able to remove more of the glass with my hands. I reach in, unlock the window, slide it up and climb into the room.

I  stand inside for a moment, look around. There’s a bookcase, a small table, a couple of chairs, some drawings on the wall. Then I hear something or think I do. I shouldn’t be in here. I reach out through the window, take a piece of glass I had placed on the roof, put it on the floor inside the room and step on it to break it. Outside I re-lock the window.  I feel guilty. “Maybe they’ll think it was a squirrel, or a branch from a tree that broke the glass,” I reason to myself.  Now I just want to get off the roof as fast as I can.  I want to get away from the house. It scares me a bit to think I could have done what I did, break into someone’s house. Walking back through my woods I’m also thinking, “I’m glad Joey wasn’t with me.  He would’ve walked all through the house. And maybe take something.”  I wouldn’t have stolen anything but still I was in a place I had no right to be.  I realized I needed a friend who would be a better influence. Instead I began to hang out more and more with Richie.  For a time he’s my best friend on the hill.  Good intentions, but you know the saying.

Richie was about my age, maybe a little younger.  He and his brothers had been a nuisance in the neighborhood when we first moved to Hyde Park.  Petty things like stealing milk off our back stairs.  Other neighbors found them to be more destructive. Lawn furniture damaged.  My older brother got to know Richie’s older brother which put us on their good side.  Aside from his tendency to harass the neighbors, Richie was a friendly kid. He’d go along with what you wanted to do, did not want to  be in charge, and was pretty good at the kid art of finding absolutely nothing to do on a hot summer afternoon and making it interesting.

I wasn’t at his house much nor was he at mine.  We were outdoor friends.  He was another of my friends who wasn’t looked after as much as he should’ve been.  I didn’t like my parents always asking me where I was going and what was I doing but Richie’s parents, as far as I could tell, ignored him. The few times I was at his house it seemed like chaos.  His older sister, I never knew her real name, we just called her Sister, took care of the younger kids.  Did the mother work all day?  My image is of a living room with bare walls, furniture stained and disheveled and little kids dressed just in diapers wandering back and forth eating things from dirty hands.  Sister, meanwhile, tried to wrangle the whole thing. Richie’s house made me nervous. 

Richie had a kind of Joey Boyle freedom. But it came at a price. I never thought he ate very well. I’m not sure if he had any regular meals like I did.  He’d pull a baloney sandwich out of his pocket or we’d buy junk food at a corner store.  Lots of soda.  Not good.

At times he and I would actually forage for food in the woods and fields in our greater neighborhood, Hyde Park and Milton. I didn't need to but maybe he did.  We knew where there were raspberry patches.  At certain times in the summer the berries were big and red and delicious.  There were apple trees left over from earlier times.  Richie would climb up, find some that were less worm-eaten than others and toss them down to me. Those apples were usually bitter and very hard.  Crab apples were for crab apple fights but once in a while we’d try to eat one.  Very tart.  There were stalks of rhubarb growing wild, pulled up to examine but never eaten.

We weren’t sure about most of the seeds and berries we came across. There was pokeweed which had clusters of purple berries that looked like little grapes. If I suggested eating one Richie would quickly exclaim, “Poison.” I’d pick some bright berries off a bush. “Poison!”  I might have been temped to eat a couple but pretty much everything to Richie was poison so I never did.  We liked onion grass, also known as field garlic. It was fibrous but tasted oniony. One thing was always forbidden. Mushrooms. Richie always had a story or two of some kid “he knew” that ate a mushroom and the gruesome things that had subsequently taken place. Lots of vomiting and convulsions. His stories put me off mushrooms until I was an adult.

We’d always be on the lookout for tall stalks of grass with seed heads at the top.  These were for “smoking”.  Sticking one in your mouth like some enormous cigarette, letting it dangle, having face sword fights with them with each other.  We also heard you could eat dandelions.  They were everywhere. Not only did the leaves taste bitter but Richie was always concerned about a dog having peed on them.  So we never did well as foragers. At least we were becoming aware of nature.  Richie and I were always in those fields, in those woods.  Along with raspberries and onion grass we also had enough ant bites and poison ivy to show for it.

I don’t know where the fascination with fire comes from for boys. I had it.  Sometimes in the back woods I’d gather some small sticks together, make a little fire, put water in an old tomato can, place it in the fire and just wait until the water boiled.  The fire with its flickers of blue and yellow flame would burn off the can’s label and then blacken the metal before the first tiny bubbles would begin to emerge from down in the water.  They’d grow larger.  Soon some wisps of steam. Finally I’d watch until the water boiled over effectively putting out the fire and ending my little experiment. I liked to pretend I was out camping. I felt confident the flames wouldn’t spread, that everything was in control. Then I tried it with Richie.

It’s fall.  Richie and I are in the field below Reeces’. Not doing much.  “Smoking” some grass stalks.  Looking up at the clouds.  We decide we are camping.  “So we need a fire,” I say. “Just a small one. I’ve done this before,” I assure my friend.

We gather up some sticks.  I usually have matches in my pocket.  The sticks won’t ignite so we start pulling up clumps of the dry grass around us to get the fire going.  We add too much.  In about a second the nearby grass catches fire.  A few moments later we have a ring of fire around us moving mostly uphill toward Joey Boyle’s woods.

There is excitement as we try to stamp out the flames, and then panic as a breeze comes along pushing the fire up toward the trees.  The last thing I remember before I start running is an enormous wall of fire, fifteen feet high, as the flames ignite the dry fall leaves on several trees. We are going to burn down the entire neighborhood, I think.  As it turns out the fire quickly runs out of fuel.  After burning the leaves off a few trees it goes out on its own.  But I don’t know that. I am already running toward Brush Hill Road, an outlaw, a fugitive, an arsonist.

The next hour was kind of crazy.  I was sure someone had called the police who were searching for me. Maybe the fire ignited someone’s house.  I don’t know where Richie went.  I was alone, very agitated, expecting a fleet of cop cars to surround me at any moment to arrest me for my crime.

Down off Brush Hill there were a couple of streets to the right.  In the days before the housing developments you could stand at the top of those streets and get a nice view of the Blue Hills.  I stood at the top of Hills View for a while, enjoying the view, trying to calm myself. Then I realized anyone looking for me would have no trouble spotting me in the middle of the street.  

Car coming.  I cross over to the other side of Brush Hill entering the woods of a large estate. Every time I see a car I hide behind a tree or duck behind a bush. One car seems to be slowing down!   Are they looking for me?  No. They drive off. I slowly make my way back to the scene of the crime using the woods as cover.  As I get closer I  smell no smoke, see no flames, hear no fire engines.  Going up through the field I see the grass is charred up to the woods but the trees that caught fire seem no worse for wear.

I go home.  Someone had told my parents. I don’t know who. Maybe Richie ran over to my house.  There were no ramifications.  Mostly because there was little if any damage.  I tell my parents I learned my lesson. Maybe I did.  At least for now.  I continued to keep matches in my pocket but the sight of that initial wall of flames as it burned the leaves on the trees stayed with me for a while.  And the fear of the cops after me as I wandered the Milton wilderness in my post-fire panic stayed with me longer. From now on I’ll stick to helping my father burn piles of leaves in our back yard.  That should satisfy my burning desires.

Richie didn’t have much money.  Not like Joey. If we emptied our pockets you’d find a small rubber ball, a pocket knife, my matches, a few sticks of old gum.  Richie had keys. He had no idea what locks they fit.  He just liked carrying them around.  One thing that was lacking was money.  A few odd pennies, maybe a nickel, that was about it. Good thing we had a plan to make us rich.

My younger brother had some friends who lived in a house over on Fairmount Avenue. I knew them too. They were much younger than I so while I rarely played with them I did get to know their mother.  Sometimes I’d do an errand for her.  Get something at a store. Move something from her house to the cellar. She liked me.  Trusted me.  Because of our mind set of being poor, Richie and I took advantage of that trust.  I still feel bad about what we did.

She had a garage next to the house.  I had been in it, moving stuff around for her.  I knew where she stored her soda bottles before reclaiming them at the store for a nickel each.  One afternoon Richie and I did the reclaiming. Without telling her. We snuck into the garage, filled a few bags with her bottles and ended up with a couple of dollars in redemption money  We’re rich. But poor in ethics.

Nothing stayed a secret very long in the neighborhood. The woman discovered the bottles gone, quickly determined Richie and I were the thieves, and let me have it the next time she spotted me on the street. She told me she was “so very disappointed in me," and “I thought you were smarter than that.”  I just stood there making no attempt to defend myself. How could I? I was embarrassed.  Angry too that I had been found out so easily.  She didn’t seem to blame Richie at all. The presumption was that, being older, and “should’ve known better," that I was the mastermind. (Actually the initial idea was Richie’s.) She demanded that I pay her back. I’m wasn’t going to get away with this. This time there were ramifications.

Somehow Richie and I came up with the money.  Probably a nickel and a dime at a time. But I did lose the woman’s trust.  I needed adult friends, as mentors, advisors, as teachers. I’m not off to a good start.

With bottle money restitution an obligation, Richie and I had less money than ever.  And there was a big deal movie we had to see.

To get to the Oriental Theatre you had to take the bus from Cleary Square.  The Fairmount was our local movie house, the one I spent many a Saturday afternoon in.  Me and a lot of kids. And the theatre showed it.  Old seats, patched screen, a curtain that did or did not work.  As a result of all those restless, destructive, soda-spilling kids, the auditorium had seen better days.  The Oriental in Mattapan was very different.

I thought of the Fairmount as the kids’ movies and the Oriental as the adult theatre.  It was bigger, well-maintained and, if I knew that word then, classy. The architecture was Asian influenced, a tad stereotyped. The ornamentation around the giant screen, along the ceiling, decorating the balcony and the box seats consisted of gates and pagodas and buddhas, that sort of thing. What everyone remembers the most about the Oriental though was the ceiling, a velvety sky with twinkling “stars” and “clouds” that slowly drifted by. Some sort of lighting effect but still so realistic a lot of people have said they spent more time gazing at that “sky” than watching a movie.

The Oriental received the big road show pictures, movies like Ben Hur, or West Side Story, as soon as they finished their exclusive engagements at one of the first run theaters in Boston.  Houses like the Fairmount might get these pictures months after the Oriental, if at all. The big movie showing at the Oriental in the summer of 1957 was The Ten Commandments. Pyramids. Tornadoes of fire. Chariots. And the opening of the Red Sea. We knew all about it, from magazines, from friends who had seen it.  But who had the dollar twenty-five ticket cost. Not us. Especially after the bottle deposit fiasco.

“Maybe we could sneak in,” Richie suggested one hot afternoon. I should have suggested we come up with an alternative.  Instead an hour later we were on the bus taking us over to Mattapan. 

The Oriental was a large theater.  The main entrance was on Blue Hill Avenue.  It’s where you bought your ticket and went inside.  But due to fire regulations there were a number of exits on the sides of the building.  They were not meant as entrances but I knew, having gone to a few movies at the Oriental with my family, that during an intermission people would use these exits to go outside to have a smoke.  My father did.  When the movie was set to resume a light just outside the door would flash as a signal to the smokers to come back inside.  During these intermissions the doors would be unlocked to allow patrons who were outside back in.

That was our plan.  “We’ll go along the side of the building to see if any of those doors are open,” I tell Richie as we got off the bus at Mattapan Square. First we checked the movie schedule. The afternoon showing had just started so I had no idea when an intermission might be.  “Maybe one of the doors is still unlocked from earlier,” I’m telling Richie.

We try a few. All locked. Now what? We go back to the front, stand by the ticket counter with sad expressions on our faces. Maybe someone will take pity on us.  No one does.

One more attempt at the side doors.  There’s someone standing outside one of them. An usher.  He’s in his uniform, flashlight in a back pocket.  He’s standing by the door smoking a cigarette.  We say hello, start talking to him.  “I hear this movie is so great.  We’d love to see it. All our friends have seen it,” I’m telling him.  “Except us,” pipes in Richie. “We got no money.”

The usher was bored, remembered when he was a kid himself, for whatever reason, he opened the exit door and let us in.  There was one admonishment.  “No noise. No yelling.  Stay as quiet as you can. No trouble.”   Sure.  We can do that.  Can’t we, Richie? I was thrilled when he let us in.  We’re going to see a movie.  At the Oriental.  And for free.

The Oriental did not have a balcony. Instead the back of the auditorium was raised, similar to stadium seating in a contemporary movie house.  That’s where we went.  It was a weekday afternoon so the theatre was not crowded.  Most people were seated closer to the screen so we had the raised section pretty much to ourselves. But it wasn’t long before we realized an epic film like The Ten Commandments has a lot of boring parts.  We weren’t that noisy but I don’t think either of us stayed in the same seat for more than five minutes. We’d walk to the back wall to watch the melange of colored light spill out of the projection room onto the screen.  Richie would try to jump with his hands over his head to see if the movie would project onto his hand. He was too short. We’d walk out into the lobby to look at the “Coming Next” and Coming Soon” posters. 

Every once in a while our antics would annoy someone in the theatre.  They’d look back to tell us to keep quiet.  We did, for a few minutes anyway.  We didn’t want to get tossed out before the big scene.  And the big scene was great.  The Red Sea opens for Moses and his followers before closing on the luckless Egyptians caught as they race across the sea bed in their chariots.  We loved that.  It was amazing.  Then the boring stuff returned.  Edward G Robinson resumed his overacting.  Richie and I resumed our antics.  Only this time we were more annoying. A couple more patrons asked us to be quiet.  That finally got the attention of the usher.  “That’s enough.  You have to leave.  Go.”

He was still nice though.  He tossed us out at the lobby entrance.  Richie and I left with our dignity.

There is a bad boy I haven’t mentioned. Her name was Ellen.

There was a brick house next to the driveway I would walk down to get to the Boyle’s. I didn’t know who lived there. Sometimes there was a girl about my age who’d play with us in Gene’s yard. As it turned out, this girl, Ellen, lived in the brick house. I didn’t know much about her.  That would change. 

The phrase “bad girl” has different meanings than its bad boy counterpart. Bad boys are often glorified, portrayed as cool, romantic.  Bad girls, on the other hand, especially teenagers, are not thought of as sympathetically.  Bad girls smoke, don’t do well in school, are promiscuous.  Bad boys exhibit the same behavior but are often given a pass. “Boys will be boys” Bad girls get reputations.

I wasn’t just an innocent kid back in the 50s.  It was worse than that.  I was naive, ignorant really.  Of the world.  Of the people in it.  Of how it was all connected. I was ignorant of the basics.  Maybe I should consider Ellen an agent of change, someone who was trying to enlighten my narrow perspective.  Or else she was just a girl dealing with her own mindset of the world swirling around her. We all have our own context.  We all have things that drive us. For Ellen it was trying to get me to play “doctor” with her.

That’s why Ellen makes the bad boy cut.  Like the boys she didn’t adhere to those assumed patterns of good behavior all authority figures pushed upon us day after day. Ellen wanted to figure things out herself.  She was provocative.  Much more so than me. 

It was not often I was alone with a girl.  At nine or ten I did not want to be stuck with a boyfriend/girlfriend label. There were times walking back from Joey’s, passing Ellen’s house, I saw her in the yard.  Or maybe after playing in Gene’s yard she invited me back to hers.  However it happened, there were afternoons when it was just the two of us.

She had mentioned several times how boys were different than girls.  How we should show each other those differences.  At first I wasn’t sure what she meant.  Strength, running ability, that I was taller than she? I’d change the subject and we’d go on to something else.  

One afternoon she asked me to come to the the back side of her house. “There isn’t anything back there,” I am thinking.  “Does she want to show me something?” 

Well, she does.  But only if I show her something of mine. It takes me a moment to catch on. Panic quickly displaces my confusion as Ellen begins to unbutton the front of her shorts. I just stand there not knowing how to stop her.  

“Wait!” I yell. “I don’t want to do that.”  I have to admit that part of me does want to see what is there but I’m afraid that someone might walk back here and catch us. An adult. As the boy I knew I’d be blamed. But I’m excited too. And agitated.  I’m conflicted.

But not Ellen. She is busy pummeling me with reasons why this is a good idea. “It’ll be fun.” “Don’t you want to see what mine looks like?” “We’ll do it real quick.” The most insistent argument she offers is the most succinct.  “I want to.”

So I did. Sort of.  I watch while Ellen gets her shorts down but when she starts with her underwear, my conflicts win out.  I shut my eyes.  Ellen is frustrated.  She wants me to look. She is pleading with me. “Look.  Just for a second.”  My eyes stay firmly closed.  As for my own part in this, I do push down my pants, with my eyes still closed, for Ellen to have a quick look at what she had demanded to see of me. I must have considered it only fair that if she did it, then I should too.  But we must have been the absurd sight, kneeling in front of each other, our pants off our hips, one of us eager to show herself off, the other with his eyes closed, yet his tiny appendage out in the air.

I quickly snapped back together, both my clothes and my senses, and hurried away from her.  I didn’t judge Ellen.  Not then as a kid. Not now. Young as she was, Ellen was exploring her feelings of curiosity, trying to reconcile how she felt with what society, in the form of parents and teachers and other adults, had instructed her to feel.  Ellen’s challenging behavior elicited primal feelings in me as well.  Unfortunately they had to do with anxiety, an endless conflict between what was natural and normal to explore and understand, and my own upheaval of guilt and shame.

Give her credit though.  Ellen was more progressive than I. For a bad girl, she was pretty good.

With Gene living in a distant part of Milton and the bad boys and Ellen only occasional friends, I found myself spending a lot of time alone.  Even after a year, I missed Gene and the times we played together in his vast yard.  So it was with much excitement I anticipated spending a day with him again at the lawn party held every August at the residence of the Missionary Sisters of Saint Columban  on Metropolitan Avenue.

I didn’t know much about religion.  Sisters, or nuns, struck me as people to stay away from.  I had heard stories of how they treated kids in parochial school.  Harshly.  Raps on the knuckles with rulers. Humiliation if you messed up a lesson. A certain atmosphere of humorless drudgery.  Those were the stories anyway. Now there’s a bunch of nuns throwing a big party on their front lawn.

The lawn parties were occasions not only for the sisters to make money for their order but also to publicize their missionary work around the world. In 1948 they had purchased a nine acre estate straddling the Hyde Park/Milton border on Metropolitan Avenue.  The big brick house with its oval driveway and large lawn fronting the street was irrelevant to me.  Just another big house when I rode by it on my bike. But it was noticeably transformed on that Saturday afternoon when the sisters threw their yearly gathering.

On that special day I'd ride up Prospect Street, cruise down Milton Avenue, hook a right onto Summit and then over to Metropolitan Avenue. Directly across from the nuns’ residence, there were woods. This is where I would stash my bike, concealing it with branches and leaves.  When I was sure no one could see it, and I’d walk around checking it out from several different angles, I didn’t want it stolen, I’d walk out of the woods crossing into the bustling world of the nuns’ lawn party.

Lots of people here this afternoon.  First thing I have to do is find Gene. I haven’t seen him in a while.  Maybe I won’t recognize him. No, there he is, talking with an adult. Why do I worry? I’d recognize him anywhere.

I wait a moment until the person he is talking to walks away.  “Gene. Hi.” He smiles, walks toward me.  No hugs in those days.  The connection is instant. That’s what friendship and familiarity are about.  No few minutes of awkwardness. No catching up. Just resuming where you had last left off.

It was good to be with Gene again.  I feel comfortable and relaxed.  No dogs to deal with.  No roofs to jump off. If I want to pee I’ll go off to the bathroom downstairs in the building.

First we just walk around the grounds, see what is there, decide what we might spend our handful of dimes on.  There is food.  I always liked the chocolate covered ice creams. I’ll do that later.  There are not a lot of rides.  No hastily put together ferris wheels or creaky tilt-a-whirls.  This was a more genteel affair.  A lawn party after all.  The nuns are fund raising for their mission so there are a number of games of chance.

I spot the one I like. It’s a table with about 25 metal cups lined up in rows and columns flush with the surface of the table. They’re painted several bright colors, each one big enough for a ping pong ball to fall into.  Around the edge of the table is an array the same colors as the indents.  To play I’d choose a color on which I’d place a dime. When enough colors had money on them, the operator would roll the ball down an incline onto the playing field.  Now everyone waits to see what color indent the ball rolls into.

Pretty simple.  And the prize was likely some cheap stuffed animal or something more at home deep in a Cracker Jack box. I didn’t care about prizes. I’d play a few games but mostly I liked to stand behind the players, think of a color in my head and then watch the ball bounce around searching for my color invariably popping into another color adjacent to the one I was thinking of.  At least I saved a dime.

I liked the hidden complexity of such a simple looking game.  The way the colors around the table emulated the colors of the indents.  Same bright glossy shine on both.  I liked the way some of the kids played, moving their coin at the last second just as the ball dropped.  I saw a few cheat too, moving their dime just as the ball settled into a color. “People, this is for charity!” a better version of me would have yelled.  Mostly it was watching the erratic path the ball would take as it bounced its way around the board.  Definitely going to drop in yellow.  Then, like one of those frustrating golf putts, the ball miraculously circles the edge of the yellow indent to drop into red. 

Gene is calling me.  He wants to try the game at the next table, the one filled with rows of small empty fish bowls.  For a dime you got three ping pong balls.  The idea was to toss a ball into one of the tiny fish bowls.  So easy.  Except it isn’t.  Ping pong balls are notoriously bouncy. (Which is why they also use them in the colored cup game.) They seem to bounce every way but into the bowls.  They careen off the sides of the bowls or bounce off the mouths of the bowls or fall between the bowls, or, with me, take a rebound completely off the table onto the grass. My technique lacked something. I try throwing underhand, or lob one into the center. A few times I try it with my eyes closed. I become frustrated, and bored.  I have to be careful too with my stash.  I only have so many dimes.

Gene’s father must have been on one the committees that had set up this afternoon’s event.  He was very busy.  I saw him several times talking with groups of nuns, or working over at one of the booths.  Some of that importance attached to Gene.  The nuns knew him, would stop to talk with him.  He also had a job which he talked me into as well.  Selling nails and bricks.

We set up at a table down by one end of the building in front of small set of stairs.  For a dollar you could purchase a brick which would help build a school or hospital in one of the myriad countries these sisters had missions.  A brick too heavy for you?  A lesser amount would buy nails presumably to fasten these buildings together. We had books of coupons, one for nails and one for bricks.  As people walked by we’d try to sell them a book or two.

“Bricks or nails.  Buy a brick.  Help the sisters.  Nails.  Buy nails.”  People may have thought we were running some sort of clandestine hardware scam so buyers were few and far between.

While we waited for customers, we began to question how nails would be helpful in the construction of a brick building.

“Do nails go in brick?” Gene would wonder. “I thought cement held bricks together,” I said remembering something my father had explained to me.  “Maybe the schools are brick and the nails are to make wooden churches,” Gene surmised.  Then, we both thought, why aren’t we selling coupons for lumber too.

Gene went to parochial school where a certain level of respect and discipline was required.  This was made clear to me when a priest and several nuns walked over to our table to inquire as to our selling success.  As they approached, Gene immediately stood up.  I just sat there.  Until I felt a sharp pain in my ankle.  To get me to stand Gene had kicked me.  I bolted up suddenly remembering priest/nun/kid protocol.  Gene talked with them a few minutes.  I stood next to him, my ankle smarting. 

For a short time Gene and I took our sales pitch on the road. We walked around the lawn asking people to buy nails and bricks, shingles, duct work, window panes, door knobs, whatever might be required to enable the nuns a roof over their heads in order to expand their missionary empire.

At first I liked walking around with my small purpose. I  asked three or four people to buy a book but after one particularly unpleasant gentleman rebuffed me by saying, “Shouldn’t you kids be in bed.” I lost interest in helping the nuns. 

Late afternoon is the best part of the lawn party. It’s bustling now.  People are two deep around the games of chance. Little kids are running through the crowd. There’s someone eating a hot dog.  Time for my chocolate covered.

Near the front by the driveway there’s a stage.  A bunch of girls on the stage dressed in short bright skirts with long white socks and black shiny shoes are dancing. Irish jigs my mother would have called them.  Step dancing. This is long before River Dance. I find it odd. In spite of their feet flashing about, the girls’ arms stay rigidly by their sides.  But I do I like the music. Someone is playing an accordion. I watch a while until the chocolate covered part of my ice cream begins to melt off the stick onto my hand.

I find Gene who hands me a trash bag.  “My dad says we should walk around and pick up tossed paper and stuff.”  I’m out of dimes anyway so I’ll help.   

Now it’s getting into early evening.  I should be heading home for dinner.  But Gene has a surprise for me.  I had seen signs advertising a spaghetti supper with two sittings in the big house. Tickets were three or four dollars.  That’s a lot of dimes.  Then Gene revealed his news. “The sisters have invited us to have spaghetti as a thank you for our help.  And for free.”

We walk over to the side of the building onto an enclosed porch. Inside there is a large table surrounded by a zillion chairs that are quickly filling up.  Gene and I find a spot in front of a large basket of bread and butter. Somehow I don’t feel out of place sitting here with so many people I don’t know.  One thing I don’t want to do is commit another faux pas, so I keep an eye on Gene to follow his lead. Soon a group of younger nuns, learning to be nuns Gene says, brings in large bowls of steaming white spaghetti, large tureens of red sauce, and plates of meatballs floating in more sauce.  Wow.

I watch how Gene serves himself. Then I do the same thing.  One difference. He dips his bread in the sauce while I lather mine with butter. Am I starving?  Was it because it was free or the fact that a kid like me never participates in something like this, I don’t know.  I do remember that food as being so good, so full of flavor, so delicious.  My father made great spaghetti and meatballs so I knew what to compare this with. It was as good as I got at home.

Eating there on that big porch with so many people was an experience like no other I had ever had.  I am handing food across the table, watching people use a spoon to twirl spaghetti onto a fork, trying so hard not to spill anything on my shirt.  I am thoroughly enjoying this.

And there is dessert.  Soft vanilla ice cream.  I sit there a while as people begin to leave. There is another serving but the nuns who are cleaning up don’t seem to mind a young boy with a glazed look in his eye, all that food settling in, savoring this new experience, spending a few additional minutes at this grand table.

The lawn party is coming to an end for another year.  I loved this day.  This event is the last fun thing before school starts again. I spot Gene way across the lawn. I shout across to him.  “Bye.  Maybe I’ll bike to your house to see you.”  He waves his arm at me before he joins his father and disappears around the side of the building.

I cross Metropolitan. My bike is where I left it. I pull it from the piles of branches, blow some leaves out of the front basket and ride it down the dirt trail back to the street.  The day is over. Tomorrow is Sunday.  Maybe I’ll watch some TV when I get home.

But there is one more thing.

I’m pedaling up Milton Avenue toward the top of Prospect Street, bike in low gear, standing up on the pedals, concentrating on getting some speed, not noticing much else.  Out of nowhere, there is something beside me keeping pace.  An enormous dog, a Great Dane, black, huge, powerful. I could reach out to touch it if I wanted. 

I don’t want to.  I’m frightened. The dog is actually bigger than my bike.  My bike with me on it.  His head towers at least a foot above mine. But he seems to be okay.  He’s not barking.  Not snapping at the tires. Not even looking at me.  Just keeping pace with a graceful loping gait. 

This is not one of Joey’s dobermans, or Reece’s pair or even the snappy little dog the girls next door have. I’ve never seen an animal like this. He is as big as a pony but with much sharper teeth. This is a dog that could have any of those other dogs for breakfast.  Yet he seems quite content just to run beside me, not concerned about guarding anyone’s property with snarls or bites.  I calm down.  Is he going to accompany me home?

No.  Coming up to the open field at the top of Milton, the enormous creature veers off, hops the stone wall and is gone. I stop my bike at the top of Prospect. I look behind me where the dog disappeared. Did that really happen, I wonder?  I’ve never seen that dog in the neighborhood before this.  For something so large and intimidating it seemed like all he wanted to do was run along side me a few minutes. A big giant dog that was nice.  

It’s quiet.  There’s still some light left in this August evening but there are shadows in places that didn’t have them an hour ago.  I did okay.  When the dog abruptly appeared I didn’t stop, didn’t fall off my bike, didn’t scream, didn’t panic.  I was cool.

I put my bike in gear and start down the hill.  Joey, Richie, Frankie, Ellen.  Maybe I could add one more name. Billy.  Maybe the baddest boy of all is me.