Thomaston’s bars were similarly segregated. East End neighborhood bars, called taverns, were the sort of places where men met after softball games, where a woman could safely go with her husband, where even kids were welcome with their parents before sundown. You could order a hamburger at the bar, along with inexpensive tap beer, and on weekends a cold-cuts-and-potato-salad buffet was provided at no charge on long folding tables. The free food sometimes attracted shabby, hungry-looking West Enders who were generally received coolly, the bartender idly asking how things were “back home.”
West End bars were rougher—gin mills, people called them—and most of them were located down in the Gut, which was also home to the pool hall and two pawnshops, both of which called themselves music stores, an illusion fostered by the scarred electric guitars as well as the odd accordion or trombone set up in the front window. Into these gin mills West End women often went unattended. At the diner I once overheard my uncle Dec, one of the few men equally at home on both sides of Division Street, talking about the previous Saturday night at a West End dive, when a woman named Gina—odd how memory works, her name racing back to me across five decades—entered, pulled her blouse off over her head and spent the remainder of the night with her bare breasts resting on the bar. Of course I immediately pictured the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered in at me that night so long ago, her naked breasts huge and pendulous.
“Yeah, you never know what’s going to happen across Division,” Uncle Dec concluded, chuckling appreciatively when the other men finally quit trying to get him to admit he was exaggerating. “In her bra, you mean,” one said in a last attempt. No, Uncle Dec insisted, he could tell the difference between tits in a bra and tits not in a bra, and these were the latter. So the rest of them then lapsed into sullen regret at not having witnessed so stunning an event.
It wasn’t the Berlin Wall, of course. West End families that had prospered, like ours, moved across Division into new and better lives, just as families in reduced circumstances sometimes found themselves slipping in the opposite direction. Most families had cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides of Division, but visiting them was like traveling to another town, even another country, with its own set of customs. Naturally, such separateness occasioned fear and mistrust, yet just as often yearning. Take, for instance, the dime stores. We East Enders had Woolworth’s, which had wide aisles and bright, fluorescent lighting as well as a lunch counter that specialized in toasted-cheese and tuna-salad sandwiches and canned tomato and chicken-noodle soup. Woolworth’s catered to downtown shop clerks who wore neatly pressed short-sleeved white shirts regardless of the weather and would leave the waitress a quarter or thirty-five cents under their plates. One of the front windows was always devoted to expensive toys, and here West End kids would congregate, pressing their runny noses up against the glass until their parents hustled them down the block to J.J. Newberry’s.
This, the West End dime store, both attracted and frightened me. It was full of cheap plastic toys whose ruptured packaging was held together by Scotch tape. Newberry’s aisles were narrow and crowded, its bins of tacky, exotic merchandise lit, at least in my memory, by little more than the light from the street outside. Most of the stuff I was attracted to there—lurid magazines like Weird Tales and motorcycle caps like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie poster of The Wild One—was for sale at Newberry’s and nowhere else. The whole store was permeated by the smell of the popcorn that cranked more or less constantly out of a stained, cloudy, antiquated machine near the front door, each kernel of exploded corn as bright yellow as a rabid dog’s eyes. It didn’t just look yellow, it tasted yellow. Needless to say, it was delicious, the reason being, according to local legend, that the machine was never cleaned, its oil never changed. When my mother and I passed Newberry’s, she’d wrinkle her nose and say, “Lord, that smell.” Little did she know how I yearned for the day I’d be old enough to go inside on my own and spend hours investigating its dark, delicious mysteries. Even then I seemed to know that all this would begin to happen in junior high.
So it was in seventh grade that all but the most sheltered of us began to share space and air with kids outside our own neighborhoods. Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, kids from all over mingled in the halls—if not the classes—of the junior high on upper Division, but this was just the beginning of a new kind of social commerce that took place on weekends. Saturday afternoons, for instance, we all came together, trailing customs and baggage we were scarcely aware of, at the Bijou Theater. We East End kids would buy popcorn at Newberry’s, and oddly enough the theater’s management didn’t seem to mind. Their own popcorn, in addition to being expensive, was fluffy and albino white, tasting of air. It was a point of pride among East End and Borough kids that we purchased our Sno-Caps, Jujubes and soda (no ice, we insisted) at the theater’s concession stand, whereas West End kids filled their pants pockets with stale, off-brand candy stolen as often as purchased from Newberry’s and generally went thirsty. Just from the detritus we left beneath the seats, the truth of those Saturday matinees would’ve been plain as day—that West End kids congregated on the left-hand side of the theater, we East Enders and Borough kids on the right. But the sticky floor would also have revealed another truth, because among the West End candy wrappers, there would be the odd Sno-Caps box, the shoe-flattened Jujube. We knew it was happening. As soon as the lights went down in the theater, shadows began to move stealthily along the bottom of the screen, left toward right, right toward left. And when the lights came up again, nervous new constellations had formed, though they held together only inside. Once we were out in the late-afternoon light, the separation would occur again, beads of oil scurrying on water.
If West End kids had to cross Division Street on Saturday afternoons to go to the movies, East Enders crossed it every Friday night to attend the junior high dances at the old YMCA on the edge of the Gut. The dances started at seven, by which time, on payday, the nearby gin mills were already revving up, and when their doors swung open, we heard the raucous revelry. By nine o’clock, when the dance let out, dark men would emerge from the bars—sometimes Uncle Dec among them—to leer at the more mature girls, West Enders mostly, since East End parents waited for their daughters in the parking lot of the Y rather than let them parade past the gin mills on their walk home.
Everything about these Friday night dances was dramatic. Everyone was there. Not the black kids from the Hill, of course, but those of us with social currency to spend, a little or a lot (even we ourselves didn’t know how much, though we were learning). Since the doors stayed shut until seven sharp, we were forced to mill about outside in the cold. In my memory, it’s always winter, though dances were held throughout the school year. Inside, up on the third floor it was sweltering, the old gym packed to capacity with hundreds of jitterbugging twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. Nothing in my previous experience of life in Thomaston so completely subverted the social order as those dances at the Y, and it was this very subversion that was at once so thrilling and terrifying. As we gathered outside waiting for the doors to open—Borough kids with other Borough kids, with the East Enders and West Enders composing their own circles—the same social rules that governed the school lunch table still applied. But there was also an electricity, a sense that once the doors opened and we clambered up those six dark flights of stairs, the air redolent of nearby locker rooms and chlorine from the basement pool, anything could happen, that our strict conventions were about to be suspended. Inside, we were in a new world that resembled the old one, perhaps even paralleled it, but was also thrillingly, dangerously off-kilter. There were secrets to be learned, and it was here that we would learn them.
The terrible anticipation began on the stairs when, if someone tripped or an adult appeared on the first landing in an attempt to slow the throng surging upward like water through the damaged hull of a ship, the stairway would jam, desire and anxiety and unbearable hope
momentarily thwarted, delaying by eternities our emergence into the gym, into Mystery itself, where the music—we could hear it there in the stairwell—had already begun to play. Once, stalled in this fashion, I happened to look at the girl next to me, and when our eyes met, I saw that hers were full of tears. Possibly she was simply afraid of being crushed. She’d been separated from her friends, and though we couldn’t move forward, those below continued to press upward, causing everyone in the stairwell, our feet locked in place, to lean forward, our hands pressing for balance into the backs of those on the next-higher step. In a matter of moments we were stacked there like semitoppled dominoes.
That’s one explanation. But I recognized this girl as a fellow East Ender and think now that her eyes had simply filled with pent-up anticipation. She was imagining her friends already upstairs, dancing without her, getting so far ahead that she’d never catch up. By the time she joined them, the boy she’d been thinking about all week, whose eyes she’d met across the crowded cafeteria, who was too popular—admit it—to be a realistic aspiration, would already be taken. We shared, all of us, a powerful sense that what was at stake on those crowded stairs was nothing less than the rest of our lives, that our every move in that gymnasium had an unimaginable significance, that we were being watched, judged, elected or damned. Slow down, we were being told at home and at school, you’ve got your whole lives ahead of you. But to get stalled in that stairwell was to understand how little time there was, and how fast it was wasting.
WHAT I MOST looked forward to about junior high was seeing Bobby Marconi again. Since homerooms were assigned alphabetically, there was a good chance Lynch and Marconi would be together. After the Marconis had moved to the Borough, I’d come to accept how unlikely it was Bobby and I would ever again be best friends. Mr. Marconi had probably made him promise that wouldn’t happen, and my mother had warned me about getting my hopes up, but I did dare to hope that we might share the same lunch period and that I’d be welcome at the cafeteria table where he sat with his new friends. Being both shy and a Catholic school boy, I feared being friendless in a new, hostile environment.
Even armed with such scaled-down expectations, I was destined to be disappointed. That first day of school, Mr. Melvin, our homeroom teacher, called Bobby’s name and made a notation in his attendance book when no one responded. Was he ill? Would he be here tomorrow? Two West End girls I knew exchanged a look, though I wasn’t able to decipher what it might mean. Maybe it had something to do with Mrs. Marconi. I was pretty sure my mother had kept in touch with her former friend because sometimes at night I heard her name come up through the heat register when I was supposed to be asleep. I was able to piece together that she’d gotten pregnant again, and Bobby had yet another little brother. And right before the baby was born, she’d apparently gone off on another unexpected trip, though it was possible I’d misheard this last part. I was always hearing fragments of my parents’ conversations, but then the heat would come on and I’d have to fill in the blanks in the phrase, the sentence, the story. So it was possible my mother was just recalling Mrs. Marconi’s previous visit to the sister whose very existence my mother had doubted. I distinctly remember hearing “turned up in Canada this time,” but by then my parents may have been talking about somebody else. I’d grilled my mother on the subject of Mrs. Marconi more than once. Had she visited her old friend at her new house in the Borough? No. Did they talk regularly on the phone? No. Was there any news about Bobby? No. It galled me that she should be able to stay in touch with Mrs. Marconi when Bobby was off limits to me. Junior high, I hoped, would change all that.
Every day that week Bobby Marconi’s name was called, and every day Mr. Melvin marked him absent on his attendance sheet. Finally, on Friday, Perry Kozlowski, who always lounged in the back row, looking bored, with his feet up on the desk in front of him, groaned audibly and said, “He’s gone.” Mr. Melvin seemed to have already concluded from Perry’s slouch and dramatic boredom that he was to be neither trusted nor encouraged. Earlier in the week, when my own name had been read in homeroom, Perry had called out, “He likes to be called Lucy,” causing everyone to laugh, as expected. “Then he can tell me,” the teacher said. “Or maybe you’d enjoy having him give you a nickname?” To which Perry had just shrugged. “He could try.”
Mr. Melvin now regarded the boy with undisguised loathing. “And how would you know?” Meaning, probably, that Bobby and his family lived in the Borough, whereas Perry was a West End kid.
“Everybody knows,” Perry replied, but did not elaborate.
I’d immediately swiveled around in my seat. Gone where? Had the Marconis moved again? Suddenly I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. I tried telling myself that Mr. Melvin was right. How would a boy like Perry Kozlowski know anything about Bobby Marconi? But I could tell by the smug look on his face that he did know something.
Halfway between us sat a thin Negro boy whose name—Gabriel Mock—was called next, and our eyes met briefly. Was it possible that even he knew where Bobby was? At the end of homeroom period we emerged into the corridor at the same moment, and I blurted out my question even before saying hello. Did he know where Bobby Marconi had gone? The look he gave me suggested I’d violated some rule by speaking to him, and I felt myself flush. “People call you Three, right?” I said, and I was about to explain how I, a white boy, happened to know his nickname, that I’d spent many a pleasant hour with his father, out at Whitcombe Park, when, looking straight ahead, Gabriel Mock the Third said, “I don’t have a father.”
MY PARENTS CLAIMED not to know anything either, and after interrogating both of them all that weekend I was convinced they were telling the truth. The following Monday, when roll was taken and Bobby’s name wasn’t called, I worked up the necessary courage to approach Perry Kozlowski and ask what he’d meant about Bobby being gone.
“You didn’t hear?” he said, contemptuous of my ignorance. “You live where—in a cave?” Bobby, he told me, had been sent downstate to the Payne Academy, a military school known locally as the House of Payne. It was rumored to be worse than reform school.
“Why?” I said, instantly frightened for my old friend.
“You’re telling me you didn’t hear about the fight? Him and Jerzy?”
Having no public school friends was the equivalent of living in a cave, so of course I hadn’t. I was to discover over the next few days that everyone else knew all about the fistfight between Bobby and Jerzy Quinn, an event so dramatic, so heroic, that its inevitable conversion from fact to legend was well under way. The details varied according to the teller, but its skeleton was pretty much the same as what Perry Kozlowski reported that day. The fight had taken place, amazingly, right outside the police station, with two uniformed cops looking on. What had occasioned the hostilities? Well, that was part of the story’s romance, because there apparently was no reason. Every witness agreed that there’d been no preliminaries, no swapping of insults, no goading, no shoving, no gradual escalation, all of which were the traditional prelude to a Thomaston fistfight. But given how the two boys had come up to each other in the street, you’d have imagined they meant to shake hands. Instead, as if someone had said go, they’d simultaneously thrown punches, though neither landed flush. Within minutes a large, enthusiastic crowd had gathered, West End kids egging Jerzy Quinn on, East Enders and Borough kids cheering Bobby. Hearing the commotion, other cops came out of the station, and that normally would have brought the hostilities to a halt, yet not on this occasion.
How long the sidewalk battle raged—two minutes? ten? half an hour?—depended on who you talked to. But this was to be expected. Most of the kids recounting the story hadn’t actually been there, though all claimed to have borne firsthand witness. In the days following the fight other scuffles had broken out when some East End kid, in the throes of an enthusiastic rendering of the event, would be interrupted by a West Ender saying, “You weren’t even there.” No one wanted to admit to having missed so semin
al an event. On another point, however, there was universal agreement, and that was the amount of blood spilled: a lot. Fights between junior high boys were fairly common after the Friday night dances at the Y and Saturday matinees at the Bijou, but rarely was blood actually drawn, and a fat lip or swollen eye was generally considered sufficient justification for calling it quits. Yet everyone who described the epic battle between Bobby and Jerzy Quinn agreed that by the time it was over, both boys—their faces, fists and shirtfronts—were a bloody mess. So much blood was on the sidewalk that it had to be fire-hosed off.
Young and inexperienced as I was, I didn’t understand that the facts everybody agrees about, especially if they’re lurid, are generally the most suspect. Hearing such details—a fire hose!—confirmed from one teller to the next convinced me they must be true. Nor did I understand how valuable I was as a listener, that a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect. The fight between Bobby Marconi and Jerzy Quinn, though drenched in glory, had about played itself out when school began. When it became known that there was a junior high boy who actually hadn’t heard about it, I became the beneficiary of an unexpected day’s worth of popularity. Here was a new receptacle, someone who could be told.