84
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
"Real
nuts," they agreed.
We laughed hard, Nicky and
I ,
at times like this , rocking back and
forth, our parents at our side.
In time I sensed danger everywhere, as violence, or my anticipation
of it, spread like infection from my home to every part of my world -
into our relatively gentle fifties neighborhood, across the city, out across
to the other side of the globe . Those years, I walked around, looking
above me, behind me, as if to detect ambush, walking gingerly, as if to
escape the mines that might be planted anywhere . Some days I under–
stood that the violence at home had made me jumpy , causing me to
imagine peril where there was none. But other days, everywhere I went
seemed truly precarious , with opportunities only for harm. Then I
viewed our home not as the source of my worries but as the solution to
life's essential condition - a kind of boot camp, training me for all the
battles out there.
The neighborhood Catholic school, Saint Brendan's, dismissed its
students fifteen minutes before our public school. This allowed the St.
Brendan 's boys to position themselves outside our school and greet us
with pea shooters and rants about cowardly Jewish moneylenders killing
Jesus Christ or brave Irish and Italian gangs killing Jews and other hea–
then trash. Some days they'd describe the prowess of the Fordham
Baldies or the Golden Guineas, accounts that confirmed my view of the
world and left me in a state of debilitating dread. The Baldies scalped
you and killed you, or if you were lucky just scalped you, while the
Golden Guineas' ritual s of violence involved painting victims in gold
paint "so the skin couldn't breathe. " At night I'd lie in bed, one hand
on my head, the other roaming my skin, half stock clerk, taking inven–
tory of my endangered body parts, half supplicant, praying for a little
more time with them.
When I dreamed those days, it was often about the bald-headed
Fordham Baldies (supposedly they shaved their own heads to allow you
to anticipate your fate) climbing through the fire escape window to
claim my scalp. The Guineas scared me too , but less, for I felt I had
outsmarted them by sleeping in socks so that even if they painted me, I
could breathe through my soles. I tried to sleep in a kerchief, to save my
scalp, but my parents wouldn't allow it. My mother, despite her natural
playfulness , had an equally innate knack - probably sharpened by years of
living with my father - for anticipating situations that could be physically
dangerous - seeing from blocks away holes in constru ction site fences
that children could fall through to their death, potholes that old people
