My Brooklyn (237)

Howard J. Klein

I am a purebred Brownsville boy. Born at 724 Stone Avenue near Riverdale. On the corner, Mary's Candy Store where on sultry summer nights the local wiseguys, descendants of Murder Inc. guys, hung out to watch the girls, book bets, make spontaneous runs to Nathan's in Coney Island and wait for the bulldog edition of the next day's Daily Nooze and Da Mirror.

At P.S. 184, we played deep into the night our stickball games only lit by the the merciful flood of streetlights. We played ringalevio till late, and on particularly awful nights, got our pillows and slept on the roof. We listened to Dodger games. When TV came along, all us kids spread the floor of my friend's house to watch the 1950s version of wrestling. WHAT GOLDEN TIMES THESE WERE, compared of course, to today's tin. From there on to Music & Art, Manhattan, NYU AND Columbia. We left for Queens in '53.

Since then the world has taken me far and wide. One poignant incident to share. In the mid-eighties I had to go to LA on business. I stayed at the posh Beverly Wilshire and decided to pop into a move nearby. The movie was Woody Allen's Radio Days—-a Brooklyn boy classic for certain. After the movie broke, I walked outside. I see a group of four guys around my age talking in hushed tones around a Silver Shadow Rolls. They were all movie guys, all Brownsville boochers originally. Guess what? I introduced myself and in a matter of minutes we were all standing their swapping stories.

But one guy brought us all weepy. He turned and said, "I have a ten million dollar house, this car cost me $200,000, zillions in the bank. I can command the lives of thousands of people, move mountains on Wall Street.

But I would swap it all for just one trip back to Nanny Gate park on a hot summer night with my girl, my Creamsicle and a hot stickball game."

I returned to my suite and listened to all night radio. Everyone moaning about some perceived indignity or problem. I turned the dial to a good jazz station, closed my eyes and dreamed my way back to that same old game on that hot summer night in another, unfortunately now dead world.

11 February 2000

My Brooklyn

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