“You have a Flesh Eating Disease!”
That is what my middle school friend Mary said to the B16 bus driver one day as we boarded after school. She repeated it to nearly everyone on the bus. I distinctly recall her saying it to a very stoic Asian youth, who would not move a single muscle while she practically yelled it in his ear, and watching an Italian-looking catholic school kid, in his sweater vest and collared shirt, struggle to keep from laughing.
The bus drove down Fort Hamilton Parkway. The group of middle schoolers who invaded that bus every weekday at about 2:30 boarded right at the end of Sunset Park, a neighborhood I knew as Brooklyn Chinatown. I loved going to the shops on Eighth Avenue. I would go with my mother to the small general shops for origami paper and to the bakeries for treats that I had no proper name for. The neighborhood existed a few blocks northwest of where I picked up the bus. I was still too young to journey there on my own, so my escapades came when my mother escorted me.
The bus passed by two adjacent grocery stores. One was the Chinese grocery store where my mother would buy fresh fish, far better than much of what we had access to on Staten Island. I only went in there once or twice, and I recall marveling at the strange foods not available in the Key Food a mile away from my house. The other one, Three Guys From Brooklyn, sold cheap produce and good Middle Eastern breads; I liked the really flat pitas and the Turkish Pide Bread. It also sold dates, something my mother would put in oatmeal much to my annoyance.
Bay Ridge, where my mother works, had a large Middle Eastern population. She loved to shop at the Middle Eastern grocery stores, especially for staples like olive oil, something every Italian American family has in their house. She loved the fact that a gallon of olive oil cost only thirteen bucks. It was seventeen dollars minimum at Pastosa’s, the Italian goods store on Staten Island that all the people who never leave seem to worship. I personally find a disturbingly low level of quality and variety in their olives, especially after my mother started buying olives from the Middle Eastern stores in Bay Ridge.
“Not in service? What the #@&$?”
It happened. We’d be waiting, a large group of us, for at least half an hour, and a bus would pass us blaring that sign. That particular phrase was first hollered by a guy a year above me, and it caught on. Whenever we had the dire misfortune of an out of service bus, a chorus would spring up and we would be in pieces. Middle schoolers happen to find expletives quite hilarious.
It’s that certain level of maturity that allowed my friends and I such entertainment in Leif Ericson Park, a mere three blocks away from the bus stop. I would see younger children playing on the sailing ship slide, in its bright yellow glory as I looked out of the window of the B16. On half days, I would go with my friends and we would dare each other to sit in the chair of doom. It was a slightly tilted chair that spun. We would push each other around as fast as we could, and see who emerged the least dizzy, or who begged for mercy first. People sold balloons and cotton candy from pushcarts. In the early summer there were ices and ice cream in those same pushcarts. We truly did not need any more sugar, but we occasionally bought cotton candy anyway.
I always wondered why that park was named for an Icelandic explorer. There never seemed to be a significant Icelandic population in that neighborhood, or in any neighborhood in New York for that matter.
I never knew the name of the other park the bus passed by on its route. It was across the street from a church. I recall a Catholic school next door to the church, but I do not remember the name. I do, however, remember the kids who got on the bus near the school, all of whom wore blue uniforms. I had a certain sense of superiority; I had figured, based on my childhood experiences, that public school was superior to Catholic school. My image of catholic schools was not improved by the stories my mother and her coworkers told about the abusive nuns of the fifties and sixties. I never spoke to the kids, nor did anyone else in the little group that took the B16 from my happily public middle school.
Going back to Staten Island at the end of the day was almost depressing. There was nowhere to walk. There was no pocket neighborhood that had a distinct culture. There was, however, something much stranger.
The house I grew up in is a hundred and ten years old. Walls did not exist when my family moved in. It has a categorization that is something along the lines of Colonial Victorian. Three floors for four people, four birds, and a dog. My mom believes it to be a mansion, and it is certainly very fancy. Almost all of the houses on my block are similar in external lavishness.
Then, if I crossed the street after the Unitarian church at the corner, heading towards New York Harbor, it became a series of apartment blocks. A junkyard separated the last “nice” house from the apartments. At the other end of my block, after making a left turn, there was an assisted living center across the street from a block of two family houses. They existed in such sharp contrast with my own block, but I never really noticed until I was much older. I learned to ride a bike in the parking lot of the senior citizen center. I love running to the mailbox in front of the two family houses. The pavement was very good, and there was just enough of a hill to make me feel as if I was flying.
My preference is definitely for Brooklyn. At first, I thought I favored Brooklyn because it was not homogeneous, or because the pockets of culture were close together. In reality, there was almost less contrast in Brooklyn than in my Staten Island neighborhood. The neighborhoods were composed of immigrants, so there was an identical immigrant energy from one neighborhood to the other. The two blocks on Staten Island were almost too different. It was almost uncomfortable.
Or maybe I just miss the carefree days on the bus, with memorable things like flesh eating diseases.
