Games in a Hearse

In the glorious springtime of our lives in Boro Park we had a custom, you should know about it because it is good for you.  And a custom, you know what by this is meant?  Surely not a costume to put on to cover up your cultural nakedness or your education without yet degrees, maybe.  Something customary, if you excuse the tautology, by the way, you should understand, means that it belongs to a class of things you and others do—but not by yourself, which would be a tic, an obsession or whatever else is unique and eccentric—when you don’t even have to think about but it comes out like a second nature, a higher instinct, that you experience it something from the inner edge of a symbolic world,  

Maybe all this is already too complicated for you, but listen with a little patience, also a drop or two of imagination, and certainly with a generous heart.  It was like this sometimes because always if you misunderstand what I am trying to say it could sound to you or it may seem in your judgmental mind too much like a boast.  However, there is no way I am trying to impress you with special qualities in my memories or in the things we used to do as kids.  It was not either, please, just ordinary like for other kids in the school or out on the streets, let alone in our houses when we sometimes because of the weather had to stay in someone’s apartment.  So a little bit normal and a little bit special.  Here it is.

We would go after school, we being the whole gantza gang, five of us, along with Tall Eddie, the big and gangly one, who was not really a regular member, but who came along with us because it was his father, the mortician, that arranged for us to be picked up outside of P.S. 164 and driven to Prospect Park in a hearse. 

So therefore I have to explain to you first of all what was involved, beginning with how we got to be friends with Tall Eddie, even though he was not (as I said) really a regular member of the gang, above all not like the other Eddie who was Dingleberry to us all.  Then I can tell you about how we were driven from school to the park in one of his father’s big long black limousine that they carry dead bodies in.  After that I can explain also by you what we did in the park although that is probably the least interesting part of this whole story.

            So to begin again: this other Eddie was taller and more awkward than the rest of us.  Being taller was in itself neither here nor there.  At least, he wasn’t like George Himmelfarb who was the tallest and thus got to march into the assembly hall first carrying the Stars and Stripes.  A big honour.  That was a good enough reason for everyone to despise George.  But for Tall Eddie being so above is in height was not enough.  Not even that he was more awkward or clumsy, though by itself, considering what peculiar little Jewish kids we were in school, it is saying an awful lot.  The reason he was an outsider was that he didn’t know how to skip.  Can you imagine?  What kind of boy reaches ten years old and does not know such a thing?  Maybe somebody from another street or school or state or planet, that it would be expected.  But from right there in our own class, it was impossible to conceive.  Nevertheless, Mrs. Devorah Kranstein, third grade teacher, assigned me the task—humiliating as well as pointless—of teaching this (not the other one) Eddie how to skip.  After two weeks, two things happened.  One, he mastered the skill to a certain degree; that is, he could put himself into a pretzel-like configuration, cup his hands in his armpits, and then do a little hop and slide that was passable for Mrs. Kranstein as a form of skipping.  Two, though not friends, Eddie and I became acquaintances.  And this led to the rest of the story I am telling by you.

            So on to the next thing it is important for you to know: Big Eddie’s father owned a funeral parlor on For Hamilton Parkway.  It had a whole building, with long steps up to the second floor covered with an awning, so that everybody who went there—and eventually everybody went there—had a special feeling: a little bit out of breath, a little bit gloomy because your eyes had to get used to the shade, a little bit anxious about what would be inside.  But if oike Big Eddie you lived right next door and saw funerals all the time and were always going up and down those stairs, it would seem that life would have a different perspective, and that at least you would know how to skip by the time you were ten years old. Nevertheless, although for most of his oife he didn’t have friends or a gang to belong to and lived so far way from 47^th Strteet, when the teacher asked me to teach him how to move along, raise his legs and lope, in other words, to skip, everything began to change.  Not that he ever became a regular of the group nor that he was a champion skipper, but we played together after school for a few months. 

When we wanted to go to Prospect Park to play ball or whatever after school, what came for us but a long and black Cadillac hearse, and we would all pile in, the whole gang, and be chauffeured  to the park for our games of softball, tag, whatever.  At first we could have been scared because who wants to ride where dead people have to lie in a coffin, but not so much scared that the very idea of riding in a hearse was not more exciting.  In fact, it soon led to games which were much better than ball or tag or whatever.  Like for instance, we would poke our heads out the windows and make faces at the people in the cars outside driving in the street.  Or we would lie down, pretending to be dead, and then jump up, assuming that everyone in all the vehicles around us were watching and would be scared out of their minds.  We would laugh and laugh until it hurt.  However, it was noticed, at least by me, that Big Eddie did not laugh.  For him being in a hearse and playing dead bodies or zombies was no big deal.  This made our various goings-to-the-park and ridings-in-a-hearse games that were even more peculiar.  In what way? They became in my soul, and I am pretty sure my reactions were unlike those of the other members of the gang, otherwise would they have become what they did later in life, and me, nu, so look at me way on the other side of the world and knowing nothing from what happened to all of them. Thus in two ways my reactions were different: First of all, I was aware of this anomaly and second I found that my merriment was anything but complete. 

            So now I will explain.  The games we played, as mentioned before, did not matter, so I don’t remember them exactly, and that doesn’t bother me much even today, it’s already more than fifty or sixty years ago.  Some things are more important than others.  Some things are too important to be serious about, and only jokes can contain their meaning, but all of this raises further complications for people like yourselves who have no experience about what I am trying to say.  Is this my fault?

Some memories when they disappear it rather hurts because you know there is something missing but can’t remember and so maybe it’s something more important than whether we played stickball or touch football or just ran around crazy and yelling because such a thing in itself can be fun if you are with people you like and they are all in your gang.  But when you can’t remember, as I am trying to say, maybe it wasn’t all so hotsy-totsy after all, and if that is so, Givalt! it could be that some grown up members of the 47^th Street gang that are approaching their allotted biblical spans like to remember riding around in a hearse and trying to imitate a living corpse that scares people in other cars for other reasons, and that would be too horrible to think about, let alone write down in a story that is supposed to be funny.  You know what I mean?

            But funny or not, did you notice that when I was writing I sometimes said “we” and sometimes said “I” and at other times “you”?  If you don’t pay attention to that kind of a thing and just skip over them—or worse, not know how to skip over them—how do you think you will ever understand what life is all about?  If a person writes “we”, he (and now-a-days it is important to include also a she) it could mean, first of all, the collective intellectual body of the writer and the reader, just as it might signify the boy who narrates the story and his gang of friends, but sometimes might and sometimes might not include Big Eddie, seeing as he was not a regular gang member, except for the few months when his father’s hearse drove us to the park and we did all those crazy things you want to laugh about.  If, to put it differently, the narrator writes down “I”, you should not think it always and exclusively refers to the single writer who writes down things on paper with a little smudgy pencil or a leaky ballpoint pen; the “I” referred to could also represent the name of the collective group of children in the past, the consolidated experience of the grown-up people reading this story, yourself included, once you have come to understand the method being used; or, to get more high-fallutin’, such an egotistical pronoun could be a mask put on by the reader and writer in their theoretical disguise as an objective intermediary between the fictional past and the professional present. 

As for the third possibility, the use of the term “you,” not just because modern English has lost any formal outward distinction between either a single, familiar second person and a plural, formal or ceremonial pronoun for the objective other in a real or implied conversation, but even has forgotten a host of other kinds of “you” typologies, ranging from gender-specific, age-appropriate, and class-based distinctions, as well as subtle nuances marking intimacy and secret political relationships.  In a strange text like this, moreover, the second person can be collective, exclusive inclusive or spiritual, so that, my dear reader, when you peruse the story again, be on the alert for times when I treat you as someone who lives in such a different time and place that anything other than a mere superficial grasp of the events described is unfortunately impossible, while at other moments (or at the same moment, depending on your previous alertness to the other distinctions) you become virtually a Buberian “thou” or a Levinesque “other as myself”.

 Or it could be—so why should I ever make anything easy for you, when we have always had such a hard time ourselves, and like poor Big Eddie who never did learn to skip properly, he (or she) grew up into the oblivion which the whole gang now shares with one another—maybe there are no differences at all.  Not even, alas, between the living and the dead. And if there really were and they all sat up and grinned, that would really be a joke, wouldn’t it?