Knots in My Yo-Yo String

Johnson

               Highway

Like much of my life until that sixteenth year, it was a sunny day. A Sunday afternoon. I was in Carol Eckert’s house on Pine Street. We were in the living room. Carol was telling me about her new boyfriend, and I, as always, was the good listener.

The doorbell rang. It was my younger brother, Bill, panting. Lucky was hit by a car!

Lucky was our dog.

I didn’t know what to say except, Where?

Johnson Highway.

I apologized to Carol and left with Bill. We ran. We ran down Pine to Roberts, down Roberts to Locust, and up Locust toward Johnson Highway. As we came near, I wanted to say to Bill, You look. I’m not stopping. I wanted to cross Johnson Highway and not look down but run on, run out of town, out of time, out of myself, because I was having a bad year, and it was too few hours ago that I was king.

East

         End

I am outside in the yard. There is the smell—sour, vaguely rotten. And then the sound. It is high-pitched, but that is not the problem. The radio makes high-pitched sounds, too, and so does my mother when she sings to me. The problem is the loudness, a force as feelable as a blizzard. Every morsel of me shrivels and shakes. And even so, maybe I could stand it if only it would stop. But it does not and does not—and I cannot hear my own scream. My mother is running out to get me … 

This is my first memory of my first house. It was on Marshall Street in the so-called East End of Norristown, Pennsylvania. Behind the house was a brewery—the Adam Scheidt Brewing Company—and that, I later learned, was where the smell and the sound came from.

The smell was hops, used in the beer-brewing process. Forming a constant cloud about us, the odor was especially strong once a day when a horse-drawn wagon hauled spent mash down the alley that led from the brewery past our side yard. Then the alley became a sour, steaming stream from the drippings of the wagon’s sopping cargo.

The source of the sound was an air-raid siren. It was propped on the roof of the brewery, hardly a stone’s throw from our house. This was during the early 1940s. World War II was raging in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and air-raid drills were a common practice in towns and cities throughout the land.

While the siren’s frightful wail seemed to come from everywhere, another frequent sound—a long, low drone—came from directly overhead. Many a day I looked up to see planes or airships—dozens, sometimes hundreds of them—moving in neat geometric shapes across the sky.

Our house was red brick, flanking a block-long row of red-brick houses that ended at the brewer’s alley. The sidewalk was brick also. We lived in an apartment on the second floor. The Printzes—Mickey, Big Leroy, and Little Leroy—lived on the first floor. And on the third. Each night they trooped through our quarters to go up to bed.

The landlady lived in the adjoining house. Neighborhood kids said she was mean. Stray balls that landed in her yard never came out. Luckily for my father’s baseball budget, she was nice to us. My father lobbed underhand pitches to me, and I regularly whacked them over the back fence into the landlady’s yard. My father, according to Marshall Street lore, was the only person ever to return alive from her yard, ball in hand.

Unable to find a bat for a four-year-old, my father bought a standard-size Louisville Slugger, then put the saw to it. He presented me with seventeen inches of hickory handle—perfect. That stunted, clubbish bat stands in a corner of my office today. It reminds me of how small I once was, and that the landlady’s fence was both the first and last fence that I ever hit a baseball over.

A budding ballplayer (age 4, 1945).

Over the fence out front, I sent something else. The gate facing the sidewalk was metal, and I used to grip those bars with my tiny hands and plant my feet and belt out Jesus Loves Me to the turning, smiling passersby.

At some point during my brief singing phase, I acquired a baby brother, Billy. My mother tells me that because I then had to compete for her attention, I brought my performances inside to the living room and kitchen.

*  *  *

The next house we lived in we had all to ourselves. It was also a row house, but it had a front porch. It was deeper into the East End, on Chestnut Street. I always remember the number—224 Chestnut—because my grandparents lived at 226, the house next door.

I wasn’t allowed to cross the street. But I did roam up and down the sidewalk, and that led me to the vacant lot at the end of our row of houses. When I think of that lot, I think of weeds and of brown and blue broken glass. It became my first playground, my first ballfield. Many of my days were spent there, until I began school.

I did not go to kindergarten, so my first taste of school was first grade at Gotwals Elementary. We learned to write the letters of the alphabet, then our names. I recall laboring over each pencil-printed letter, and the miracle of completing my name on the blue-lined paper: my first written work.

I was destined to learn little else at Gotwals. We rented our house on Chestnut Street, but my parents had been searching for a place to buy. When they got the chance, they took it, even though it meant transferring me to a new first grade in a new school.

We were moving to the West End.

West

         End

The West End became more than my home and neighborhood. It became my New World. No coonskin pathfinder ever explored his patch of earth more thoroughly than I explored mine.

The address was 802 George Street, second house in from Elm. Another brick row house, another brick sidewalk. For ten years I would live there, from ages six to sixteen.

The 800 block was the last block on George Street. It was a dead end. Beyond the last house the asphalt stopped. A three-foot-high wooden barrier made it official. I learned that dead end meant two different things. To a grownup it meant Stop—Turn the Car Around. To me, a kid, it meant Go—Your Territory Starts Here. Before the wooden barrier was the structured, orderly world of grownups, the neat grid of streets and houses that gave shape to their lives. Civilization.

Past the barrier was frontier. Climb over the fence or simply walk around it, as a car could not, and you found yourself in knee-high weeds. Then came the railroad tracks, then the woods, then the creek (pronounced crick in Norristown). This swatch of undeveloped land featured not one but two dumps, plus a swamp, Red Hill, the spear field, the stone piles, and a black and white pony. Who needed playgrounds? And lucky me, the portal to this kid-size continent was the dead end of my new street named George.

I spent much of the next ten years in this houseless, streetless wilderness and in the park on the other side of the creek. Sometimes I was with others, sometimes alone. By the time the ten years were up, I had caught a handful of salamanders, hit a home run, raced against my stopwatch, searched for the Devil, kissed a girl, and bled from an attack of leeches.

But I did not go to sleep on the frontier side of the dead-end fence, or wake up there, or go to school there. And that was okay, because the civilized side also had something that seemed expressly made for me and my playmates, geographic features that appeared on no map, had no names, yet were intimately familiar to all kids in the neighborhood. Seen from above, they would appear as a second, nameless grid overlaid on the public one. I speak of alleyways.

To me and the neighborhood kids, the back of a house was more important than the front, and we happily roamed the alleyways that bordered our backyards. Alleys were sized to make us comfortable—with a running start, you could practically broad-jump across some of them. In an alley it was the car, not the kid, that was the intruder. Alleys were for sneakers and bikes and trikes and wagons.

Alleys had no rules, no signs. Danger and parental interference were minimal. You could lie on your back in the middle of an alley (if you wanted to) and close your eyes for five minutes and not be run over. You could hang the frame of an old wooden chair from a telephone pole spike and use it as a basketball rim. In an alley you could practice riding your new bike in peace, then ram it into potholes and get yourself thrown, like a bronco buster. You could check out other people’s garbage cans. If you wanted.

If you ran away from home, or planned to, you would go by alleyway. The network of nameless alleys mimicked the town’s official layout. You could go anywhere—for all I knew, clear across the country.

With the frontier and the park and the alleys available to us, you might think we would stay off the streets. We did not, of course. If it pleased us to get up a football game in the middle of the street or hide from seekers under parked cars, that’s what we did. Because, in truth, our territory was wherever we happened to be. Whichever side of the dead end we were on, whichever side of the door, we confiscated the turf and made