Young Americans

One finalP.S. 163 memory…like I said before, 1975 was the year that I said goodbye toP.S. 163, my mom transferred me over to P.S. 75, which was almost half a mileaway…long enough to make for a sucky walk but not long enough to entitle me toa “bus pass”, school-issued cards that allowed kids to ride free on the bus…thedamn things didn’t have any photos on them, so they were easilytransferable…kids would buy them and sell them…and the bus drivers didn’t givea crap…city employees didn’t care…

For a shortwhile, I was stopping in this donut shop on the way to school…it was on thewest half of Broadway between 96th and 97th streets…nowthis building “The Columbia” is there, erected in the mid-‘80s…I would read“Highlights for Kids”, this kiddie magazine, when I was in school or visitingthe doctor’s office…I hated reading so I’d never read the articles but I likedthe cartoons…”Goofus and Gallant”…it was a preachy type of panel cartoon aboutthese two kids that looked like twins…”Goofus does (XYZ bad things)”…”Goofusdoesn’t clean his room and he’s rude to people”…”Gallant always keeps his roomneat and respects his elders”…and Goofus always had an angry look on his facewhile he was doing something bad and Gallant was a nice, smiling boy”…so it wasa little panel cartoon “educational”, trying to teach kids to do right…

But onearticle had something to do with kids approaching their parents for an“allowance”…like parents should give their kids a few bucks a week spendingmoney…and so by this time I had asked my dad for an allowance…I think I got 5dollars a week…and so I’d spend my money at that donut shop…this was 1975 andso I bet a donut and a glass of O.J. could not be much more than a dollar…

When you’re alittle kid, pretty much all of the adults that are around you are some type ofauthority figure or “caring” adult…your parents, of course, are the firstadults you come into contact with…then there are relatives like aunts anduncles, then there are family friends, and teachers, camp counselors, etc…andso at this donut shop it felt weird to be around a bunch of adults who lolreally didn’t give a shit about you, who were living their own lives…I wasalmost expecting some adult to come up to me and say “hey kid, you know youshouldn’t be eating donuts, they are bad for you”…I know it’s something that myparents or teachers would say…but nope, it never happened…

It’s funnythat even back then, I knew donuts were crap…like people frowned on eatingsugary junk…so for a few weeks, before I got bored of it, I would go to thedonut shop every morning and buy a strawberry frosted donut and a glass oforange juice, and sit at the bar looking out the window while I had my littlebreakfast…it’s funny how I rationalized it, I told myself the donut is bad foryou but I’m washing it down with fruit juice which is healthy…they always toldus fruit juice was good for you…it wasn’t til much later that I learned thatthe stuff they call “fruit juice”, the stuff I was drinking was probablyTropicana, was almost as bad for you as a soda…

There wasthis kid named Antonio at P.S. 75…Puerto Rican kid…he grossed me out because hewould eat chocolate candy bars and drink Coca-Cola with it…now I KNEW that wasbad…and his teeth were very dark brown, almost black…I was telling him of mygood friend Freddy Roman one time, and he said “I hate Romans”…and wasthinking, “wtf?  His name is Roman andhe’s Puerto Rican, not Roman”…idiots…anyway…on to my story…

For the threeyears I attended P.S. 163, my routine was to go to the school yard after schooland play baseball with my friends from 3 until about 6, then go upstairs fordinner…my school, the school yard, and the apartment I grew up in were all onthe same block and I could live my entire week without having to cross onestreet…

At first Ididn’t want to transfer to P.S. 75, but kids don’t get to make that decisionand so you know how it is, when a change is forced on you that you don’t like…anew life, basically…you try to “keep” as much of the old as you can…I really“made the rounds” during the summer of 1975: trip up to Lake George, NY, a few weeks with some family upstate (theFresh Air Fund), and then the obligatory week in Freehold, NJ with mycousins…during this time period we also took a trip down to Richmond, VA, tovisit with family there…I’m not sure of what year it was but my best guess was1975…and then after the summer was over, starting a new year, I had to go tosome strange school…part of how I coped with it was that I told myself that at3 p.m. when school let out, I was going to go back to the schoolyard at P.S.163 to play baseball with my old friends…I had no say in being transferred toP.S. 75 but I was determined to just do my time there and keep my old friendsand hang out with them…

but it wasweird when September came, the first day of school and then I went back to theschoolyard of P.S. 163 to play…there were a lot of new people there…FreddyRoman was there along with a few other kids that I knew, but…most of the kidsthere playing ball, I didn’t know…they were mostly older kids…Freddy Roman andmy other friends knew them, I guess…or were just playing with them anyway…buthere was another change I didn’t like…so the first few times I went to thatschoolyard after school I didn’t even try to play, to get on a team…and nobodyasked me…I was thinking about trying to get on a team…had to work my courageup…I started standing closer and closer to the action each day…I kind of feltexcluded that no one asked me if I wanted to play…eventually, I started standingso close to the action it’s like I was on the field…

this one day,I was standing to the left of the batter’s box…someone “got a piece” of a pitchand hit a foul ball, bouncing towards me…so I picked up and then didn’t throwit to the pitcher…I just looked at it…all of a sudden, everyone was looking atme…my old friends, and plus all these new kids…

I guess I wastrying to show off or look like a big man, or I was just fooling around…and soI said “I’m going to roof your ball”…one kid said “you better not”…and so Ithrew the ball towards the part of the school that is one-story…the schoolbuilding made an “L” shape and so one part of that “L” was where the classroomsare and I started throwing the ball at the part of the “L” that I think was thecafeteria…one story…

Of course Ididn’t want to roof the ball…I wanted to scare them…so I kept throwing ithigher and higher towards the roof…trying to bounce it off the school as highas possible without actually throwing the ball on the roof…and these kids were gettingpissed…angrier and angrier every time I looked at them…and so I was going tomake a few more throws and then give them their ball back…it was gettingboring, anyway…and…you guessed it…finally with one throw, I threw the ball onthe roof by mistake…and then I was scared as shit…I had about four or five kidscoming towards me…

During mytime at P.S. 163, there were some kids who knew how to climb up on to theschool roof. It was something that I always wanted to do, but didn't think Icould and for a long time I was too scared to try. I had tried a few timesbefore, I would be at the point where I climbed up on the outer window ledge,but that was it…I was to scared to push up with my feet and pull up with myarms. I was scared of falling and getting hurt…there was a metal window guardcovering the window and it had very small holes…the best way to describe it wasthat it looked like a chain-link fence, but with very small holes…with a normalchain link fence, you stick your feet in the holes and then climb up with yourhands, almost like a ladder…but it was impossible to do that with this windowguard, the holes were way to small to fit your feet in…

I was alwaysthinking it would be fun to climb up there and walk around. I had a fascinationwith buildings and their inner workings at this time…stairwells, roofs, etc… inany given building you go in…you walk the stairwells and all the floors lookalike except when you get to the very top or the very bottom…then you see theguts of the building and that was fascinating…I even kept my fascination withstairwells when I became a young teen and started smoking weed…they were greatplaces to explore, hang out, and get high in….but P.S. 163…I had a clear view ofthe school building from my terrace and also from the windows in my apartment,and sometimes I'd see people walking around up there, workers… There were thesedark, grayish pebbles that they put up there, I guess to protect the roof? …

So I had fouror five big kids coming towards me…one of them said, “you better go up thereand get that!!”…and so at that point survival took over and the first thing Ithought to do was say, “oh I’ll go get it. No problem”…I don’t know why I said that…to buy myself a few seconds more??...theywere going to kick my ass…

So I turnedand started heading towards the window ledge…I climbed up on the ledge easilyenough, as I had done a few times before…but then what??...I stuck my fingersin the small holes and just started pulling myself up…it hurt likehell…basically I was putting all of my body weight pressure on my fingers, thethin steel cutting into my hands…then I got close enough to reach for theroof…grabbed the roof, and muscled my way up onto it…I did it!!  What a weird feeling…a combination of reliefI wasn’t going to get my ass kicked, and amazement at “wow, I did it”, combinedwith my instant realization that the only reason I did it was because I knewI’d get my ass kicked otherwise…the fear of falling and the pain in my fingerswas outmatched by the fear of having all of those people mad at me…it was totaladrenaline…

It was anamazing world up there, like walking on the surface of the moon…first thing Idid was look for these guys’ ball…I started to mildly freak out when I realizedI COULDN’T FIND IT!!...still nervous as hell…finally after looking around for awhile I found their ball, and threw it down to them…and they resumed theirgame…getting them their ball was the first order of business….

…ever sincethe idea of the possibility of climbing up on the roof had occurred to me, Iwas always thinking that one of the first thing I would do was hunt forballs…to us baseball freaks, it was all about balls…balls were kind of like acurrency…baseballs, softballs, rubber balls, tennis balls, you name it…I hadalways thought, “if I ever get the chance to climb on that roof I’m gonna beRICH!!...i’m gonna have so many balls”…because lots of balls get roofed bymistake…and so that’s what I started thinking…but then right away, a new fearcame over me…how am I going to get down??...

so I frettedover that for a while…and I also realized that I didn’t have a bag oranything…if I just collected balls and toss them off the roof and climb down Icould only carry so many and also some of the kids I don’t know could just takethem I figured that since “I know how to climb on the roof now” I would justget a bag and then climb back up later…I got them their ball back and I reallywanted the entire stressful situation to be over with, and also…this is apersonal tendency of mine…if I have some sort of “moment of truth” event comingup…something I have to do that I’m not sure of…I want it to happen NOW…I don’tlike sweating things out or dreading some future situation…as a grown-up Ihated hearing, “the boss is mad at you and wants to meet with you on Monday”…itwould ruin my whole weekend because I’d be sweating the load…and so I couldn’treally “enjoy” my roof time not knowing if I could get back down…and I startedworrying what I’d do if I couldn’t get down??...

so I made myway towards the part of the roof where the window was that I scaled…climbingdown was a lot easier than climbing up…just climb down the window to whereyou’re low enough and jump to the ground…

I rememberthinking I just want to get the hell out of here, and go home…I don’t even wantto hang out in this playground anymore, I don’t know any of these new kids andI think I don’t like my old friends from the playground anymore…I decided tojust spend more time hanging out with my friends in the building…Chuck, Boris,and Billy were my homeboys…we were the proverbial Three Musketeers…and so wewould just visit one another in our apartments…and so I slowly stopped going tothat schoolyard…except a few years later, once in a while to smoke weed…

I DID go backto the schoolyard a few weeks later, on a Saturday…and I brought a bag thistime…the playground was often empty on the weekends, as it was this day…and Itried to climb up on the roof at the same location and in the same way I haddone a few weeks earlier, but I couldn’t…that’s how I KNEW it was the fear thathad gotten me up there a few weeks before…

I was stillobsessed with climbing up on that roof…I felt cheated!!  I had climbed up it the one time but didn’tget a chance to get all the balls up there…I felt robbed…I thought about it fora long time…and so maybe a year or so later an idea came into my head:  I was going to pick a time and just walkaround the entire circumference of the building and find a spot where I couldget up on to the roof…this was no small undertaking, it was major to me…theschool building is HUGE in terms of acreage…it’s like one block wide and twoblocks long and there are all of these fences you have to navigate…like you can’tjust walk around the school building there are bushes in one spot, a smallplayground in another spot, there’s the part that’s three stories high and I knewI wasn’t climbing that…some of it was facing the street, some of it was behinda black fence with spikes on the top which was not easy to climb…

I knew it wasgoing to be an adventure, and a challenge…maybe almost another year elapsedbefore I finally got up the balls (no pun intended) to go and walk the entirecircumference of the building and find a good spot to climb up…it actually didn’ttake very long…I found this guard railing near one of the main entrance doors…stoodup on that and then there was some grating on this window that was EASY toclimb, and voila…I got up on to the roof…I looked around and I didn’t see verymany balls…I think I saw about six…and I forgot to bring my bag so I juststuffed as many in my pockets as I could…

That was at atime where I had stopped caring so much about baseball and was more intosmoking weed…I went up there a few times…I think I got high up there once butother than that it was a place to hide from people…I had my one spotoverlooking 97th street that I just liked to chill at and lookacross the street at “120/180”…this huge building that was across the street…

Eventually I gotbored of going up there…climbing up there was too much of a pain in the ass andit occurred to me that I was a sitting duck up there…like if I was up there andsome other kids climbed up they could mug me and I’d have no place to run to…therewas one way to climb up there and one way to climb down and so if I was upthere and some kids came they could gang up on me, beat me up, take my moneyand there was no “escape route”…so I was through was climbing up there exceptfor one last time..

A few yearslater when I was a teenager and had been smoking weed for a while…think thiswas in the summer of 1982…I was carousing my neighborhood with about four orfive of my buddies…and I was thinking to myself, “hey, it’s been a few years”…andso I convinced them and we all climbed up on the roof…we did some graffiti,smoked some weed…one of my friends saw an opening with a metal cover and priedit off to see what was underneath…

He pried ifoff, look down and it was a ladder…”we can get in the building!!!”….ahahah!!...sothey climbed down…I didn’t really want to but we did…we were in the janitor’scloset…with all the mops and brooms and cleaning equipment…machines…wax, soap,cleaners and what have you…we opened the door and YES…we were in the school…”hello,old friend!” I was thinking…I had not been inside this building in the last 7years…

We vandalizedkids’ art work and community announcement boards…wrote graffiti…and I pissed inone of the hallways…we had a grand old time…then left…went back on the roofthen went back in and did some more…

And then afew weeks later my mom got a letter in the mail…it appears that one of my oldschool teachers was living in Park West Village,the complex that was on the other side of the school from my building…Mrs.Beck, who was my second grade teacher…she recognized me and she knew my mom or Iguess got her address out of the phone book…whatever…and sent my mom a lettersaying she saw me with some other kids climbing in there…I’m sure it was bignews LOL when people came back to school…idk what happens to elementary schoolsduring the summer…do they just lock the buildings up in june and reopen in September??...iguess these days the buildings get used for something, year-round…

And so my momconfronted me about it and of course, I lied J…Isaid Mrs. Beck must have the wrong person and my mom believed me, gave me thebenefit of the doubt…but it was me J

And that wascertainly the last time I climbed up on that roof!!...but I went back in thereone more time in the ‘80s to vote…and this has been my final P.S. 163 story…goodbyeP.S. 163!!