The Greased Watermelon

By S.P. Moran

“I’d rather be an optimist and a fool, than a pessimist and right” (Albert Einstein).

It’s the summer of ’61 and fifteen-year-old Firpo has escaped the sweltering Bronx and gone up the lake to spend his vacation. He’s decided to find a girlfriend, a steady, just like the cool guys on American Bandstand dance with in South Philly.

He figures it will be a cinch.

What Firpo doesn’t figure on are the confounding consequences that result from mixing teenage hormones with young and stupid mental states.

Journey back to a more innocent time as Firpo and his merry band of friends set out on a quest for love and the answer to life’s sweet mystery in the land of foolish optimists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532061288

S.P. Moran

S.P. Moran was born and raised in the Bronx, N.Y. After over three decades of civil service and community volunteering, he retired to a life of leisure. Married with three children and several grandchildren, he and his beautiful wife live among the rolling hills of Maryland with their champion Boston Terriers Max and Augie. S.P. Moran is the author of several books, including The Sunny Side of Hell, The Falling Off Place and the cult favorite Escape From Zombie Island Trilogy.

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Copyright © 2018 S.P. Moran.

Author Credits: Stephen Moran

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6127-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6128-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  10/29/2018

A Tale of Raw Youth in Search of Love

During the Summer of ‘61

T

o my brother Marty

Esse gratiae, quia frater meus, et in titulum

The Lake: a place of enchantment where I enjoyed many blissful summers long ago – a place that will repose in my heart and mind until my last breath…and then, if I have been a good boy, a place I will revisit in eternity.

S.P. Moran

Memoirs of a Bronx Boy

Contents

Labor Day Weekend 1961

Now or Never - Part One

Late June 1961

Out of the Bronx

When Ya Going Up The Lake?

July 1961

Of Fish Guts And Vomitus

Target Practice for Boobs

Cheap Thrills and the Panama Canal

Behind the Eight Ball

Pastoral Interlude

Rain Delay

The Great Raid Or How to Lose a Canoe

Down Hill Crasher

BLT

August 1961

Driveway to Heaven

Deluded Interlude

Crackup or Good Bye Stud

Thought it was birdshot.

StagNation

Little Miss Dynamite

Lake on Fire & You Stink

Labor Day Weekend 1961

Picnic

Now or Never - Part Two

Post Labor Day 1961

Lots of Endings

Labor Day Weekend 1961

I’d rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.

Albert Einstein

Now or Never - Part One

L ike Elvis, my knees were shaking and I was white as a dove. Good God, I was all shook up. How’d I get into this situation? Why, just the other day I passed time bragging about riding a bike with no hands and blowing fish out of the water with cherry bombs. Now, I am sitting next to a girl, not just any girl, but the girl of my puberty addled dreams, anxious to ask a momentous question and feeling like I’m leaning forward on a high balcony without handrails.

I am fifteen, caught in the Twilight Zone crossover age between childhood and the real world. A time of much bafflement. A time when girls are something more than perplexing creatures to be avoided.

Somewhere in a distant treetop an owl hoots. He mocks me, I am sure. Diane and I sit at the end of the diving board perched a few feet above the lake’s unruffled blackness. My right arm is about her waist. I lean closer, intent on kissing her neck, then her lips and a calculated, coordinated movement of hands and fingers until…until I can force the words through my jittery lips.

What if she resists? Will she squirm, or startle at my boldness? If she resists my sudden move, will it unbalance us and send us into the chilled water below? Am I strong enough to grab her and keep her from the drink and the embarrassment of scampering home red faced and screaming rape? (I mean, this was the early ‘60s, not the depraved era I grow old in.) What will my friends think? The owl won’t be the only one hooting. Then again, she may not resist. She may allow me to nip her on the neck and proceed around to her lips, the sweetness of which I am willing to die for while I pursue an answer to the question burning a hole in my duodenum.

Yes! A sugary lip lock…roaming hands…a fevered question… and…and what? If I get this far, will she be expecting it? Or, will she take offense and run screaming incoherently into the black woods while I dash after her shrieking my own gibberish?

What if she is expecting it and is receptive to my question? Welcomes it in fact. Then what?

The truth is, this is all rather new to me. This is uncharted territory and I wish I were back in the Bronx playing stickball and chugging a grape soda. If this goes south and she skedaddles off into the night wailing like a banshee all the way home, my ass will be grass.

When the shrieking and sobbing subside, what will she say to her father, a rather amiable Texan who in fact taught me how to fish and gut the catch? Will he gut me?

Whoa, boy, whoa.

Talk about over thinking a situation. Jeeze!

Something stirs beneath us. A water snake glides across the still lake’s surface. Diane sees it and lets out a gentle Ohh and grabs my right hand and pulls it tighter against her side. She feels taut; her youthful muscles firm yet wondrously soft and inviting all the same.

The damn owl hoots again and I yearn for a scattergun. Enough of this over thinking, excuse making, delaying the inevitable prattle dividing my reason and my will. It is time to act. I am a man after all. Well, okay, maybe that’s a stretch. But, I am not a child either. I’m fifteen for God’s sake and ready to start junior year.

From heaven above, or perhaps from Ellen Grant’s lake facing porch up the hill on the other side of the dock, floats the silky croon of Elvis exhorting "It’s now or never…" Shit on a shingle, as my father would say. What a sign!

I begin my advance.

Late June 1961

Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be.

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dr

Out of the Bronx

W hen ya going up the lake? Richie would ask.

Next week, after school’s finished. I’d answer.

This question and answer were indisputable signs that the school year was about to end and summer vacation begin. Richie and I had been best friends for years, ever since we were in kindergarten at the parish grammar school. Each year when the last day of school drew near, Richie would ask and my answer was always the same.

Summertime and the living wasn’t easy. Like the Lovin’ Spoonful sang, "Hot town summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty"…not to mention sweaty and peeling from the first sunburn of the season courtesy of the previous weekend’s visit to Coney Island.

I looked forward to getting up the lake, leaving the gritty, gray concrete of the city streets behind, for a while at least. Good-bye to water bugs and alley cat serenades at two in the morning. No more sweat soaked sheets on hot, humid nights. As far as I knew, air conditioning was something that only movie houses and department stores had. My parents didn’t even have a fan in the apartment. Leave the windows open and swelter in 90 degree heat along with the water bugs that crawled up the outside brick wall and in through the hole in the window screen, or close the window and slow cook like a pot roast in mom’s crock pot.

Conversely, I had no problem with the crickets and grasshoppers and spiders and assorted creepy crawlies that inhabited the countryside surrounding the lake. Bugs just seemed normal there; they were part of nature and one just didn’t think about it. In the city, things with more than two legs, outside of dogs and cats, were un-natural, some kind of vermin, spawn of the devil.

I’d miss my friends, but I saw them almost every day the rest of the year, and besides, I had friends at the lake who I only saw during the summer months…less time to enjoy their company…a greater urgency to squeeze out all the joy that lay hidden in the days and nights of summer.

It wasn’t so much a matter of what I’d miss or not miss as what enjoyments lay ahead.

A lake, one of many in New Jersey, but for me: The Lake. Fresh, clear water you could drink, leaping fishes and slithering water snakes, a blue sky above and foot tickling seaweed beneath; you could lay on a raft softly rocking as a passing speedboat’s wake passed beneath, and listen to the gentle lapping of water against the nearby cement dock’s edge. A pleasant drone from far off lawnmowers would drift through the air along with the hum of insects and chirping birds, slowly mesmerizing you into a shallow sleep. You lay there dreaming of grilled hot dogs and chilled watermelon and bicycling along dusty back roads and what the girl you were smitten with looked like in her new two-piece bathing suit.

I thought it was the closest I could get to heaven on earth.

When Ya Going Up The Lake?

W hen ya going up the lake?

Richie had asked me that last week and I had answered, Next week after school’s finished.

Now it was next week and school was finished and I stood by the old, black sedan as my aunt Janey stuffed the last of the bundles into the trunk. I forget whether the car was a Chevy or a Plymouth or maybe a Dodge. Those mid ‘50s blue-collar sedans all looked the same. My mother stood next to her older sister and chewed the fat. I scanned the block, looking up towards the Concourse and then swiveling my head back in the opposite direction towards Jerome Avenue. At that end of the street, younger kids were playing ‘off the point’ – a game played with a pink rubber ball - a Spaldeen – when there weren’t enough guys for a stickball game. In theory all you needed were four players, two to a side, an infielder and an outfielder. You played the game ‘across’ the street rather than ‘up’ the street, so the field of play was greatly shortened. The ‘batter’ threw the ball against the side of a building where the cement or brick stuck out an inch or so, which was about two feet up from the ground. Balls that hit the side of the building across the street were playable, so if you caught it ‘off the wall’ before it touched the ground, it was an out. If you didn’t catch the ball before it hit the ground, it counted for each time it hit - once was a single, twice a double and so on. A nifty way to pass the time when you were undermanned.

Up a bit from the game, some girls were hanging out by the entrance to Greenblat’s candy store. The owner’s husband, Saul, was a shell-shocked World War One veteran from whom you didn’t want to buy ice cream because he drooled a lot and would dribble into the container. Mr. and Mrs. Greenblat were Jewish. Plump Mrs. Greenblat knew more about the Catholic Church than the Pope and she wasn’t shy about reminding you of it. One of the girls leaning against the store’s window was Rachel, a Jewish cutie who had once upon a time set my heart a-thumping until her mother forbade her to have anything to do with me. I was a goy of a guy and she needed to find a nice Jewish boy who would one day grow up to be a lawyer or a dentist or at least an exorbitant podiatrist. In short, a good provider for her babycakes.

I made a mental photograph of all about me. I wouldn’t see the block for over ten weeks, close to a lifetime. Apartment buildings lined both sides of the street, with ground level stores strung along the lower half of the block. We had the candy store, a beauty parlor, a tailor, a Chinese laundry, a grocery store, a drug store and just around the corner there were other shops including an ice cream parlor, a bakery, a delicatessen, a barber, a fresh fruit and vegetable market, and three beer gardens within spitting distance of one another.

The neighborhood was half Jewish and the other half mostly Irish and Italian, with a sprinkling of other United Nations representatives. There was a Turkish family and some Canadians and a Scot’s man or two. There were even some Asians, Orientals as we called them, a Chinese family and a couple of Korean ones. No Japanese though. This was still but a little over a decade since we had kicked their bonsai butts.

Most of the Jews were Polish war refugees, the rest smart Germans who had gotten to America before the rest of Germany began to goose step to Hitler’s tune. The Irish and Italians were mostly immigrants or first generation American children of good old Paddy or Luigi. Same with the other nationalities.

It made for an interesting neighborhood. You could pick up some Yiddish and Italian, not to mention a few Chinese curses. It was also a place where a lifelong appreciation for corn beef and pastrami sandwiches on rye and potato knishes and matzos and pizza and lasagna and baked ziti and kielbasa and so on was born.

Actually, it made for a great neighborhood, one of hundreds such neighborhoods sprinkled throughout the Bronx and other parts of New York at that time.

So, you’re leaving?

It was Mrs. Egan calling down from her second floor window to my aunt.

Yes, very soon, my aunt replied, and whispered something to my mother. Probably about Mrs. Egan, the neighborhood gossip in chief.

So, when will you be back?

My aunt didn’t reply, but ducked her head into the back of the car feigning a last second check on things.

I turned and saw Richie coming towards us.

He grinned with that half silly half embarrassed look of his, all red faced and jovial.

So, ya going today.

In a little while.

I hated goodbyes. It was like being on a blind date with a Martian and trying to think of something to say. I mean, goodbye, I’ll see you…take it easy…see you soon…when school starts…except, I wouldn’t be seeing Richie when school started in September. He’d be heading to the Sacred Heart Brothers. I’d see him once more in life, when his parents took me to visit him at the novitiate in New Jersey where he went to study to become a Brother. His mother took a picture of us at the time, the two of us standing together looking for all the world like the pair of uncertain teens that we were.

Well, take it easy.

Yeah, you too Richie.

I looked about and it dawned on me there weren’t any of the other guys around.

Hey, where is everybody?

Oh, they took off for Freedom Land. Supposed to be good. Lots of rides.

Yeah, like Disneyland they say. How come you didn’t go?

Oh, I have to help with my uncle. He’s still sick.

My mother grabbed me.

Now be good and do what your aunt Janey says.

While I was talking to Richie, my cousins and aunt had gotten in the car. I gave my mother a hug and waved goodbye to Richie and got in the car. My aunt pulled out slowly and we rolled down the block towards Jerome Avenue. I looked back and Richie was still waving. Was Rachel waving too? Before I could wave back, we had turned the corner and my mother and Richie and Rachel were out of sight. They might as well have been on the moon.

As we turned onto Jerome Avenue and its part paved, part cobblestone surface, my cousins and I bounced about like heated popcorn. No seat belts in those glorious days of freedom. We rattled along, between the steel girders and beneath the elevated train tracks above, the Jerome Avenue El. Sunlight flickered between the track’s wooden slats.

I was already missing the guys. Just the other day, the lot of us had descended on the Lowe’s Paradise to see a double feature, some British remake of The Werewolf – which was okay – and a Hitchcock classic, Psycho, which had been out the year before but was always worth seeing. We were all still mesmerized and scared witless. It was glorious. We vowed we’d never take another shower, although that was not much of a promise considering we were teenage boys. Actually, being teenage boys, the main reason we went to see the movie was to cop a look at Janet Leigh in her bra. We had unanimously voted her as having the best set of knockers in Hollywood. She didn’t disappoint. For the next few days it was all about Janet Leigh and her bra and what size do you think it was and too bad John Saxon hadn’t removed it. The guys couldn’t get enough.

Carmine Englese, whose mother was a great cook and looked it, was familiar with large bra sizes as momma Englese was about twice the size of another well-stuffed Italian - Sophia Loren - and Carmine’s sister Maria was rather buxom as well.

She’s probably a 36 or maybe a 38.

No way, Carmine, claimed Frankie, who lived in my building. She’s gotta be a 44 or something.

You’re nuts Frankie.

Aw, whaddya know anyway?

I know I gotta sister that’s got a real set of bazookas and I seen her bra plenty of times so I know bra sizes and Janet Leigh is about a 36 or 38 tops.

You seen your sister’s bra? asked Eddie, another one of our crowd, in amazement.

Everyone crowded around Carmine.

You seen her boobs too? asked Eddie, feverishly.

As fate would have it, with hearts fluttering and hot blood coursing through throbbing veins, Carmine’s mother announced lunchtime from her third floor window and Carmine took off like a roach when the light goes on.

Ah well. We’d have to wait for another time to hear Carmine’s response.

In any event, the bra discussion was a welcome relief for me since previous to seeing Psycho, all the talk was about Mickey Mantle’s latest six hundred foot home run against Detroit that flew over the right field roof. Being the only Giant fan in the group, I had to put up with nauseating Yankee fans throughout the baseball season, although a couple of months earlier, I got to crow when my idol Willie Mays smacked four homeruns in one game against the Braves. Ah, that was sweet.

Within a few days, even Janet’s bra size was forgotten as we began debating whether there would be a heavyweight-boxing rematch between the champ Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. The two had fought a few times already, but the dearth of good heavyweights had spawned rumors these two might go at it again. The Swede’s name gave Eddie, the neighborhood jokester, a chance to break into his My name is Johansson, I come from Visconsin… routine.

I listened to the last couple of fights on the radio with my father and uncle Al, a big fight fan who knew everything there was to know about boxing. He swore Floyd would regain the title before the first rematch and this happened during the fifth round when Patterson decked the hapless Swede with a timeless left-right combination, knocking him out for a good fifteen minutes. For a while the crowd thought Johansson might be dead, but the trainers eventually revived him and he wobbled off back to Sweden where he ate plenty of cheese and recuperated.

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We bounced along between the steel girders; the car’s radio was tuned to WINS, a rock & roll station that played the top forty. The AM signal hissed in and out fighting the interference. Ricky Nelson was warbling Travelin’ Man", currently in the top ten and my cousin Teresa was reading Teen Beat magazine ogling pictures of Ricky and a pair of Italian punks from Philly, Frankie Avalon and Fabien, yuck on one and all. She was trying to decide who was cutest. Those guys wouldn’t last two minutes in the Bronx. As far as I was concerned, they all stunk. Give me Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis any day. While Teresa perused the pompadours, her younger brother, my cousin Joey, and I debated pro wrestlers.

Antonino Rocca would toss Ricki Starr out of the ring.

Not if Ricki could get that reverse ballet toe flip in.

But Rocca’s got a big nose; it could take a blow.

Yeah, but if Ricky did the reverse fake and spin around and use the other foot…

And so it went. Gorilla Monsoon would have crushed both of them.

We were out from under the train tracks and rolling across the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, to the Cross Bronx Expressway, and then a swift plunge into semi darkness as we sped beneath the high rise apartment buildings that straddled the expressway until, miracle of miracles, we burst into the bright sunlight and on to the glorious George Washington bridge with its massive arches and gleaming steel suspension cables. We all strained to see the mighty Hudson River. Even with my nearsightedness, I could make out tiny sailboats and motor craft lapping through the white-capped currents far below.

Like a puff of smoke in a gale force wind, thoughts of the Bronx and my block faded into the ether. To the west rose the mighty Palisades, twenty miles long and rising anywhere from three hundred to nearly six hundred feet above the river. I dreamed of climbing them…maybe finding an Indian arrowhead or the bones of Uncas.

Off the bridge and on to route 46 West. We were officially in New Jersey, just Jersey to us New Yorkers. We might as well have just passed through the Cumberland Gap of the 18th century. As far as I was concerned - a city boy used to concrete, asphalt and brick- we were in Daniel Boone country and adventures lay ahead.

The drive to the lake seemed interminable. Back then, in a slow moving sedan traveling along a mostly two-lane road, the fifty mile trek seemed a coast-to-coast excursion, not the interstate hour it’s been humbled to now.

Along the way we stopped for lunch at O’Dowd’s Milk Bar & Restaurant, a popular place for sandwiches and ice cream. They had the best corn beef sandwiches west of any Jewish deli in New York. Their ice cream was home made and the fatty, velvet goodness of their chocolate offering lingers still somewhere in the back of my mouth. The rest of the trip, each of us sat quietly, sated with ice cream and day dreaming in anticipation