Born on the Fourth of July Read online

  It’s early in the afternoon. I’m standing on my braces, holding on to the parallel bars. My mother and little sister have just come through the doorway. It is the first chance for them to see me try to stand again. My mother is frightened, you can tell by the look on her face, and my sister is standing next to her trying to smile. They are holding each other’s hands.

  My legs are shaking in terrible spasms. They’re putting thick straps around my waist and around my legs and now my arms start to shake furiously. My mother and sister are still standing in the hallway. They haven’t decided to come into the room yet. Jimmy is strapping my arms along the pole and my big oversized blue hospital pants are falling down below my waist. My rear end is sticking out and Jimmy is smiling, looking over to my mother in the corner.

  “See,” says Jimmy, “he’s standing.”

  I start throwing up all over the place, all over the blue hospital shirt and onto the floor, just below the machine. Jimmy quickly undoes the straps and puts me back in the chair. My sister and my mother are clutching each other, holding real tight to each other’s hands.

  “It’s really a great machine,” Jimmy says. “We have a couple more coming in real soon.”

  I turn the chair toward the window and look out across the Harlem River to where the cars are going over the bridge like ants.

  3

  FOR ME it began in 1946 when I was born on the Fourth of July. The whole sky lit up in a tremendous fireworks display and my mother told me the doctor said I was a real firecracker. Every birthday after that was something the whole country celebrated. It was a proud day to be born on.

  I hit a home run my first time at bat in the Massapequa Little League, and I can still remember my Mom and Dad and all the rest of the kids going crazy as I rounded the bases on seven errors and slid into home a hero. We lost the game to the Midgets that night, 22 to 7, and I cried all the way home. It was a long time ago, but sometimes I can still hear them shouting out in front of Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue. There was Bobby Zimmer, the tall kid from down the street, Kenny and Pete, little Tommy Law, and my best friend Richie Castiglia, who lived across from us on Lee Place.

  Baseball was good to me and I played it all I could. I got this baseball mitt when I was seven. I had to save up my allowance for it and cash in some soda bottles. It was a cheap piece of shit, but it seemed pretty nice, I mean it seemed beautiful to me before Bobby and some of the other guys tore the hell out of it.

  I remember that I loved baseball more than anything else in the world and my favorite team was the New York Yankees. Every chance I got I watched the games on the TV in my house with Castiglia, waiting for Mickey Mantle to come to the plate. We’d turn up the sound of the television as the crowd went wild roaring like thunder. I’d run over to Richie’s house screaming to his mother to tell Richie that Mantle was at bat.

  And Richie would come running over with his mitt making believe we were at Yankee Stadium sitting in our box seats right in back of the Yankee dugout and when Mantle hit a homer you could hear the TV halfway down the block. Richie and I would go completely nuts hugging each other and jumping up and down with tears streaming down our faces. Mantle was our hero. He was like a god to us, a huge golden statue standing in center field. Every time the cameras showed him on the screen I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Back then the Yankees kept winning like they would never stop. It was hard to remember them ever losing, and when we weren’t watching them on TV or down at the stadium, Kenny Goodman and I were at Parkside Field playing catch-a-fly-you’re-up for hours with a beat-up old baseball we kept together with black electrician’s tape. We played all day long out there, running across that big open field with all our might, diving and sliding face-first into the grass, making one-handed, spectacular catches. I used to make believe I was Mel Allen, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Did you see that?! Did you see that, folks?! Kovic has just made a tremendous catch and the crowd is going wild! They’re jumping up and down all over the stadium! What a catch, ladies and gentlemen, what a tremendous catch by Kovic!” And I did that all afternoon, running back and forth across the gigantic field. I was Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and all my heroes, rolled into one.

  When we weren’t down at the field or watching the Yankees on TV, we were playing whiffle ball and climbing trees checking out birds’ nests, going down to Fly Beach in Mrs. Zimmer’s old car that honked the horn every time it turned the corner, diving underwater with our masks, kicking with our rubber frog’s feet, then running in and out of our sprinklers when we got home, waiting for our turn in the shower. And during the summer nights we were all over the neighborhood, from Bobby’s house to Kenny’s, throwing gliders, doing handstands and backflips off fences, riding to the woods at the end of the block on our bikes, making rafts, building tree forts, jumping across the streams with tree branches, walking and balancing along the back fence like Houdini, hopping along the slate path all around the back yard seeing how far we could go on one foot.

  And I ran wherever I went. Down to the school, to the candy store, to the deli, buying baseball cards and Bazooka bubblegum that had the little fortunes at the bottom of the cartoons.

  When the Fourth of July came, there were fireworks going off all over the neighborhood. It was the most exciting time of year for me next to Christmas. Being born on the exact same day as my country I thought was really great. I was so proud. And every Fourth of July, I had a birthday party and all my friends would come over with birthday presents and we’d put on silly hats and blow these horns my Dad brought home from the A&P. We’d eat lots of ice cream and watermelon and I’d open up all the presents and blow out the candles on the big red, white, and blue birthday cake and then we’d all sing “Happy Birthday” and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” At night everyone would pile into Bobby’s mother’s old car and we’d go down to the drive-in, where we’d watch the fireworks display. Before the movie started, we’d all get out and sit up on the roof of the car with our blankets wrapped around us watching the rockets and Roman candles going up and exploding into fountains of rainbow colors, and later after Mrs. Zimmer dropped me off, I’d lie on my bed feeling a little sad that it all had to end so soon. As I closed my eyes I could still hear strings of firecrackers and cherry bombs going off all over the neighborhood.

  The whole block grew up watching television. There was Howdy Doody and Rootie Kazootie, Cisco Kid and Gabby Hayes, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The Lone Ranger was on Channel 7. We watched cartoons for hours on Saturdays—Beanie and Cecil, Crusader Rabbit, Woody Woodpecker—and a show with puppets called Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. I sat on the rug in the living room watching Captain Video take off in his spaceship and saw thousands of savages killed by Ramar of the Jungle.

  I remember Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show and my sister Sue going crazy in the living room jumping up and down. He kept twanging this big guitar and wiggling his hips, but for some reason they were mostly showing just the top of him. My mother was sitting on the couch with her hands folded in her lap like she was praying, and my dad was in the other room talking about how the Church had advised us all that Sunday that watching Elvis Presley could lead to sin.

  I loved God more than anything else in the world back then and I prayed to Him and the Virgin Mary and Jesus and all the saints to be a good boy and a good American. Every night before I went to sleep I knelt down in front of my bed, making the sign of the cross and cupping my hands over my face, sometimes praying so hard I would cry. I asked every night to be good enough to make the major leagues someday. With God anything was possible. I made my first Holy Communion with a cowboy hat on my head and two six-shooters in my hands.

  On Saturday nights, Mrs. Jacket drove us to confession, where we waited in line to tell the priest our sins, then walked out of the church feeling refreshed and happy with God and the world again. And then Dad and I and the rest of the kids went to church on Sundays. The church was a big place. It was the most enormous place I�
�d ever seen, with real quiet people sitting up straight and mumbling things. And I remember smelling this stuff and seeing the priest moving back and forth behind the altar, speaking in words we never understood.

  And the Sunday comics and Dad cooking big breakfasts of hash brown potatoes and eggs, filling our bellies and making us feel warm and good inside. After breakfast I read the colorful comics on the living-room rug. There was Dick Tracy and Beetle Bailey, Dagwood and Blondie, Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant and Donald Duck, Dondi and Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Uncle Scrooge and Gasoline Alley.

  My father was a checker at the A&P. He worked real hard. He was like a big hurricane, always moving with his big strong arms, raking the leaves in the back yard or building new parts to our little house. One summer I remember hammering nails on the roof with him and feeling proud to be up there with him doing all that hard work. Sometimes, he’d get angry because all of us weren’t working, or cleaning or just acting busy. It seemed important to be moving whenever he was around and acting busy if you didn’t have anything to do.

  We were always moving, all the kids on the block and me, like there was no tomorrow. We cut up our mothers’ broomsticks, hiding the brooms in the basement and taking the sticks out to Hamilton Avenue for that night’s stickball game, where we’d belt high-bouncing Spalding balls for hours off Kenny’s roof and into little Tommy Law’s hedge. We hit eggballs that used to spin crazily sideways with everyone screaming “Eggball! Eggball!” seeing if the guy who was pitching on one bounce could handle the lopsided pop-up. Whoever hit the ball past the second telephone pole right in back of Kenny’s father’s station wagon, or over Tommy Law’s hedge, made a home run. We played every night in the spring and the summer until it was dark and the only light left on Hamilton Avenue was the street lamp.

  We collected Topps baseball cards of our favorite players and traded them and flipped them and scaled them down against the wall at Turner’s Bar.

  In the spring we dug up worms and went fishing with Bobby Zimmer. I made a Morse code set with Castiglia, stringing the telegraph wires across the street to his house. We did science experiments with his chemistry set and Bobby and I played red-light-green-light on summer nights when Mom was taking the clothes off the line. And when it got dark my sister Sue and I chased fireflies with glass jars.

  In the fall we played touch football in the streets and raked the summer leaves that had turned brown and fallen from the trees. We and our fathers swept them and piled them and packed them into wire baskets by the sides of our houses, burning them and watching the bright embers swirl in the wind. And the trees again stood naked in the back yard like they did every fall and winter and the air became fresh and cold and soon there was ice on the puddles in the streets outside our houses.

  We’d all go back to school and for me it was always a frightening experience. I could never understand what was happening there. I remember once they called my mother and told her I had been staring out the window. I tried to listen to them, and sit in the chair behind the desk like they told me to, but I kept looking out that window at the trees and the sky. I couldn’t wait until the last day of school when we all ran out of our classrooms, jumping up and down, throwing our books in the air, singing and shouting “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks!” We were free. And another summer vacation began for all of us on the block.

  When the first snow came we’d get our sleds out of the basement and belly-whop on sheets of ice out on Lee Place in front of Richie’s house. We had snowball fights and built snow forts and snowmen. Castiglia and I and Bobby Zimmer used to grab the back bumpers of cars and see how far we could slide down the street on our shoes. Kenny and I would hide in Parkside Woods plastering the cars that passed along the boulevard with ice balls, then get Bobby and Pete and the rest of the guys and go down to Suicide Hill, a tremendous steep hill by the woods, frozen like glass, with a tree stump at the bottom you had to swerve around. Me and Bobby would head straight for it, and just before we were about to hit it, I’d jam the wooden steering bar with my foot, throwing up sparks and ice, just missing the stump by inches. Then both of us would spin off the sled, rolling down the hill on top of each other, around and around, laughing into a huge snowdrift. We made winter gloves out of our fathers’ socks, packing snowballs with them until they became soaked and frozen and our fingers would become numb and we’d have to take them off. I loved when it snowed, and so did all the rest of the guys on the block.

  Every Saturday afternoon we’d all go down to the movies in the shopping center and watch gigantic prehistoric birds breathe fire, and war movies with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. Bobbie’s mother always packed us a bagful of candy. I’ll never forget Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back. At the end he jumps on top of a flaming tank that’s just about to explode and grabs the machine gun blasting it into the German lines. He was so brave I had chills running up and down my back, wishing it were me up there. There were gasoline flames roaring around his legs, but he just kept firing that machine gun. It was the greatest movie I ever saw in my life.

  Castiglia and I saw The Sands of Iwo Jima together. The Marine Corps hymn was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats, humming the hymn together and watching Sergeant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo Jima with the marines’ hymn still playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats. I loved the song so much, and every time I heard it I would think of John Wayne and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day. I would think of them and cry. Like Mickey Mantle and the fabulous New York Yankees, John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima became one of my heroes.

  We’d go home and make up movies like the ones we’d just seen or the ones that were on TV night after night. We’d use our Christmas toys—the Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades, the little green plastic soldiers with guns and flamethrowers in their hands. My favorites were the green plastic men with bazookas. They blasted holes through the enemy. They wiped them out at thirty feet just above the coffee table. They dug in on the front lawn and survived countless artillery attacks. They burned with high-propane lighter fluid and a quarter-gallon of gasoline or were thrown into the raging fires of autumn leaves blasting into a million pieces.

  On Saturdays after the movies all the guys would go down to Sally’s Woods—Pete and Kenny and Bobbie and me, with plastic battery-operated machine guns, cap pistols, and sticks. We turned the woods into a battlefield. We set ambushes, then led gallant attacks, storming over the top, bayonetting and shooting anyone who got in our way. Then we’d walk out of the woods like the heroes we knew we would become when we were men.

  The army had a show on Channel 2 called “The Big Picture,” and after it was over Castiglia and I crawled all over the back yard playing guns and army, making commando raids all summer into Ackerman’s housing project blasting away at the imaginary enemy we had created right before our eyes, throwing dirt bombs and rocks into the windows, making loud explosions like hand grenades with our voices then charging in with our Matty Mattel machine guns blazing. I bandaged up the German who was still alive and had Castiglia question him as I threw a couple more grenades, killing even more Germans. We went on countless missions and patrols together around my back yard, attacking Ackerman’s housing project with everything from bazookas to flamethrowers and baseball bats. We studied the Marine Corps Guidebook and Richie brought over some beautiful pamphlets with very sharp-looking marines on the covers. We read them in my basement for hours and just as we dreamed of playing for the Yankees someday, we dreamed of becoming United States Marines and fighting our first war and we made a solemn promise that year that the day we turned seventeen we were both going down to the marine recruiter at the shopping center in Levittown and signing up for the United States Marine Corps.

  We joined the cub scouts and marched in parades on Memorial Day. We made contingency plans for the
cold war and built fallout shelters out of milk cartons. We wore spacesuits and space helmets. We made rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. And one Saturday afternoon in the basement Castiglia and I went to Mars on the couch we had turned into a rocket ship. We read books about the moon and Wernher von Braun. And the whole block watched a thing called the space race begin. On a cold October night Dad and I watched the first satellite, called Sputnik, moving across the sky above our house like a tiny bright star. I still remember standing out there with Dad looking up in amazement at that thing moving in the sky above Massapequa. It was hard to believe that this thing, this Sputnik, was so high up and moving so fast around the world, again and again. Dad put his hand on my shoulder that night and without saying anything I quietly walked back inside and went to my room thinking that the Russians had beaten America into space and wondering why we couldn’t even get a rocket off the pad.

  It seemed that whole school year we talked about nothing but rockets and how they would break away into stages and blast their satellites into outer space. I got all the books I could on rockets and outer space and read them for hours in the library, completely fascinated by the drawings and the telescopes and the sky charts. I had an incredible rocket I got for Christmas that you had to pump compressed water into. I pulled back a plastic clip and it would send the thing blasting out across Castiglia’s lawn, then out onto Hamilton Avenue in a long arc of spurting water. Castiglia and I used to tape aluminum-foil rolls from Mom’s kitchen to the top of the plastic rocket then put ants and worms in the nosecone with a secret message wrapped in tissue paper. We had hundreds of rocket launchings that year. Though none of our payloads made it into orbit like the Sputniks, we had a lot of fun trying.