Rhode Island Part I

The strangest part about moving from New York to Rhode Island was that we did not exactly leave everything behind. It was more like that old saying "no matter where you go, there you are."

So there we were.

We moved into our swell new middle class neighborhood over a weekend, my mother and father priding themselves on their ability to unpack or store every single box from the move in one day. My mother would not even let us go to bed until she had hung curtains in every window. This would become a habit - a point of pride every time we moved. "We've hung curtains the first day in every house we ever lived in," she would tell awed friends and acquaintances, as if this were a significant issue. I suppose that first time in a new house she wanted everyone in the new neighborhood to wake up that first morning and be jealous of her and her pressed chintz curtains and little stylized bric-a-brac on the window stills. Why waste time?

That very next Monday I started school alone for the very first time. Unlike St. Helena's which covered the full educational womb to tomb of K-12, in Rhode Island they broke things up. You went from kindergarten to sixth grade in one place, seventh and eighth in a "middle school" and then off to Coventry High School - Home of the Oakers.

My brother was in the seventh grade and so he was assigned to middle school, which seemed to me to be a huge move - like going to the big house or shipping off to college. He would come home that first day with tales of gym classes where you actually had to shower with other boys, and a wood shop class with saws and vises bolted onto tables. Bottom line was that he would no longer be walking to school with me or home in the afternoons. It was going to be me by myself on the "cheese" - the yellow-orange bus that would pick me up and drop me off a few blocks away from the house every single day.

I have no recollection of what school my sister went to. She may have been with me or maybe stayed home as a pet for my mother for all I remember. Really, it's as if she was left in a closet in the Bronx and some years later someone remembered it and drove down released her and she would reappear in my consciousness years later walking down the street smoking a cigarette one afternoon.

My personal assignment was Hopkins Hills Elementary, a typical 1970s-model school, a stamped out long and low red-brick building with chairs of silver tubular legs and primary colored plastic backs and seats. This was not St. Helena's, which was old, which happened to be the way I liked it. St. Helena's was a throw-back place with a 50s sensibility. Everything there was solid and ancient, the floors endless aisles of dark brown deeply-scuffed tiles, the walls thick muscles of plaster and dark crosses above doorways, and the urinals in the boys room were the old kind that reached all the way to the floor, not those short ones you have to stand on tip-toe to reach when you're young. I swear in the bathrooms at St. Helena's you could still smell your grandfather's piss in there from when he missed at age 10.

That first day my mother took me to school. She was dressed impeccably, young and kind of hip and new York, like a go-girl girl with a little class. She only went as far as the office where she filled out papers and talked to the secretaries with a phony smiled plastered on her face - the smile she used when she wanted something from someone, the charming smile. Finished with her business she ditched me. "I'll see you later, honey" she said well within earshot of the Rhode Island school secretaries who, I'm sure she wanted to nod and smile and make a mental note "classy New Yorker, good mother too. We must sign her up for the PTA."

Someone (a principal, an assistant principal, an office worker?), led me to my class - my "Home Room" which was to be the room I'd start and end my day. Other classes were apparently held in other rooms. At St. Helena's there was only one room - you stayed there all day at the same desk with the same teacher who would switch subjects like an actor in a one-person play, "okay now get your mathematics books out..."). Much simpler to deal with.

I recall being introduced to the class by the teacher. "This is Kevin Thornton, he is new to our school. He is coming to us from New York City, please welcome him." Jesus, she had to mention the New York thing. I was hoping to just slide into a seat in back, keep my mouth shut and kind of check out the lay of the land before sharing any personal details. Little did I know I had brought with me an already damaged persona and a Bronx accent so thick you could have sniffed me out as a foreigner in a syllable anyway.

That first day I kind of saw what Hopkins Hill Elementary School was all about and I was not thrilled. In late morning the teacher let us out onto the school grounds after lunch. Hopkins Hills had a huge lawn with big brown patches where the grass had worn away, and a basketball court with the nets missing. Within a couple of minutes of our "recess" there was a big noisy gathering at the edge of the hoops court. A thin blonde-haired kid who I found out later was named Casey Dykins, was on top of a fat red-haired kid named Mike Sponik. Casey was beating hell out of him, kneeling on his chest and wailing punches at his reddened face. Casey's jeans rode up on bent legs. He was wearing short black velvety Beatles boots and short white socks that peeked out between his pants and shoes. I stood at the edge of the shouting crowd and watched the beating, wishing I was miles away from Coventry, Rhode Island and making a mental note never to piss- off the blonde-haired kid with the Beatles boots.

Rhode Island actually turned out to be okay, at least on a personal level. In time I met and began hanging around with Casey Dykins and his next-door neighbor Ritchie Noel, both of whom lived in tiny run-down white clapboard houses close to the school. I met a girl named Heidi Galinski, a buxom sixth grader who waited every morning at the same bus stop as mine wearing a shortie parka that did nothing to hide the matured body it encased. Once when we were ice skating on a nearby pond Casey took Heidi inside a big drainage pipe at the edge of the frozen pond and claimed he sucked on her middle school tits. I wished at that moment that I had been Casey Dykins.

I think Rhode Island was where I began to find my place. Back in the Bronx you chose friends by age and location. All the kids I'd hung out with were in the same grade, went to the same school and lived on the same street. It was damn near impossible to avoid or dislike them - you were constantly with them. Rhode Island, though was a new experience. There was no one on our street - Lawnwood Road - who was my age, and the kids I went to school with were scattered around for miles in little neighborhoods and houses all over Coventry. The boundaries of my childhood had definitely grown.

Meanwhile my parents were less and less engaged in my life. My dad had his great job and worked late a lot. My mom seemed to slip pretty easily into the 70s suburbia scene. She made some friends right away - a woman across the street, Mary, a young skinny blonde with an overactive five-year old son whose husband was in Viet Nam, and Kay Vernel our next door neighbor. He was a mechanic who wore a dark blue shirt with his named stitched on it, and she was a buxom 30s housewife who wore he hair in a huge beehive hairdo. My mom would occasionally go out for drinks during the day with Mary and at night with Kay. I supposed she was showing them her New York stuff.

With my parents fairly absent I started finding my own way and made two friends I ended up spending most of my Rhode island time with, kids who were as opposite as the Bronx and Coventry. One was Bobby Card, who was actually a year or two older than me but was still in my grade since he'd been left back a couple of times. Bobby lived close to Hopkins Hill and came from a strange family with married sisters and a step-dad and a house that looked more like a shack with carcasses of cars abandoned in the yard.

Bob and I met because in seventh grade after I'd made the leap to middle school we each began "dating" girls who lived in Wood Estates, a subdivision of colonial houses a couple of miles from Lawnwood Road in distance and a couple more in social status.

Every few days Bobby would walk past my house (my parents had forbidden me to hang around with him calling him "trash"), and I would meet up with him on Hopkins Hills Road. From there we would hitchhike up Tiogue Avenue to the entrance of Wood Estates announced by a low signs, the wooden letters painted brown like wood, then we would separate. I would disappear into the first house on the street where my girlfriend Nancy Barber lived. He would go up a few houses Donna Martin's. I would sit with Nancy in her unfinished basement on a ratty old couch french kissing for hours while listening to an eight track tape with one song on it - Janice Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee. It just played over and over again. At an appointed time, Bob and I would meet again for the hitchhike home. It was a perfect relationship.

Bob had other friends besides me, and other activities besides hitchhiking to Wood Estates. He was, everyone in the seventh grade agreed, the toughest kid in school, which gave me instant status as his friend. Bobby was short but muscular with bulging biceps and bowl legs. He was part American Indian and proud of it. He wore his long black hair to his shoulders and worshiped the Paul Revere and the Raiders song 'Cherokee Nation" as if he'd once sat in a sweat lodge and painted his face like a warrior. Bobby also had little strands of chest hair and had to shave. I remember him walking along Tiogue Avenue with his thumb out wearing a bright blue silk shirt with puffy sleeves like something Errol Flynn would wear for a sword fight. I was a lost kid, misplaced and struggling to find my own identity, wondering what I was going to be, how things were going to play out. Bobby had no such issues. He was Bobby Card, and if you were in seventh grade, you definitely wanted to hang out with him.

When Bobby and I weren't hanging around he was running with the remainder of the school toughs, kids like Gary Barnett and Tommy Munroe, kids with missing parents who unbuttoned several buttons on their shirts and carried boxes of Marlboro red cigarettes in their socks and pockets. When we were waiting for rides, Bobby would regale me with tales of drug deals and highs - mainly speed and acid, as well as sexual encounters and the occasional joy ride in someone's car.

The other kid I spent time with was jay Morrison. Jay lived just a few blocks from me in a long white rancher with aluminum siding and a stockade fence on the sides so high you had no idea if there was backyard behind it. Jay's parents had died in a car accident when he was very young and he was being raised by his grandparents, a settled, tough old couple who seemed to take on the responsibility of raising a young boy like a chore that had been added to their work on the farm.

Jay's grandparents had three boxers, the kind of watchdogs dogs that would only listen to their master, so when I would knock on the garage door looking for Jay I would have to wait until he or someone came out and held the big animals before I could enter. They never bit me but I never went near them either.

Jay's grandparents were characters. His grandpa reminded me of my own. He wore green mechanic-type pants and a white undershirt shirt every time I ever saw him. The two grandparents would always sit at the kitchen table with the windows closed chain smoking Salem 100 cigarettes and drinking coffee. When you were in their house you had the feeling that time had stopped, that maybe they been alive and young once but something had happened and it all suddenly came to halt, never again to move forward. Jay and I rarely went outside. His grandparents were very protective, scared, I'm sure that something could happen to the only link they had left to their dead child. They had the boxers and Jay and their cigarettes. They was all they needed.

I guess in a way I found comfort in that. At least they were always around. At least they wanted to know where Jay was and what he was doing. It was a little creepy, but it was comforting to know that they cared, that someone was always looking over Jay and thinking about what was best for him.

A major move

I am in the back seat of a dull red Renault Dauphine. It's a small car. Really, a minuscule thing with a rounded roof and perfect round headlights that stick out like the eyes of a cute bug. My father covered all the seats in clear plastic so the inevitable soda and ice cream spills could be wiped away before staining the faux light brown leather interior and the Dauphine would remain spotless.

Three of us are crammed into the back seat along with various items from our now empty apartment, and Mitzi the orange and white-striped cat. There is a mop, the bushy white head jammed beside my legs, the long blue stick of a body hanging out the window, like a bony finger pointing the way to an uncertain future. The mop was the last thing my mother had packed. She had relentlessly cleaned her way out of 2001 Newbold Avenue, apartment 1A , closing the door that last time on immaculate emptiness.

It was winter, but winter in New York City isn't so much a dramatic change from summer or fall. There's no trees to shimmer in their sad bareness, no green grass to turn a lifeless shade of white. It's just colder and fewer people are on the street.

My brother and I being the two oldest are sitting at the windows on either side of the car. My sister, the baby, is stuck smack in between for the three-hour drive up Interstate 95. My brother and I on opposite ends of our small world have each rolled our window down to catch the last little bit of what we are sensing we are losing. The slight smell of car exhaust and ancient sewers that for years have swallowed our pink Spauldeen balls, the muted light of late afternoon, blocked as always by buildings; the smooth black street, the speckled tan sidewalks. These have been the borders of our reality, the lines drawn around our little lives. Now are leaving them.

This is a big moment, and even at the tender age of 11 I know it. We are jammed into this can of a car pulling out of a parking space heading away to a place I've never seen for reasons I don't quite understand. But we are leaving. That much I know.

My mom and dad had already been to Coventry Rhode Island a few times and they'd come back talking about a safe and comfortable place, New England but not New England, backyards and grass, a house, a real house with a separate bedroom for my sister, and another one for my brother and I to share. I pictured it like Lucy and Ricky on 'I Love Lucy' when they'd moved from New York out to Connecticut to a sprawling but warm house with bushes and closets and neighbors in kerchiefs and sunglasses who dropped in for ice tea.

I was in the sixth grade when my father came home from work and announced to the family at dinner one night that we were moving. Metropolitan Life Insurance was opening a regional office in Providence, Rhode Island and he was going to be the Assistant Manager. Big stuff, big promotion, he was going places. We were to follow.

Until that moment as the car eased out of the parallel spot on Newbold Avenue it had not seemed real to me. Of course I'd told all my friends we were leaving but it didn't seem to have much of an impact on them. They weren't leaving so what did it matter? No one cried or wailed, there were no parties, no secret plans for me to sneak away in the night and hitchhike back to the Bronx. Just "that's cool, sounds like a neat place," and we'd go back to whatever it was we'd been doing - playing hide and seek or Red Rover or walking to the candy store for a moon pie and an RC Cola.

I was just a kid so I hadn't really had to do anything to prepare myself. I didn't pack anything (my mother would never allow it anyway since I could never do it neatly or well enough), I hadn't had to sign papers for the school or break leases or buy new furniture. My dad had just said we were moving and I watched as the activity at our house changed from furtive to excited and mom cleaned and threw out or gave away nearly everything we had including my beloved collection of matchbox cars (with my permission to a little kid in the apartment house more pathetic than me), and one afternoon it just became time, and my dad told us to "wrap it up and get in the car."

I am staring at everything, searching the street for a familiar face, someone chasing down the car with tears streaming down their face. My dad punches the push button drive and we slide out onto the street. I watch his fat, freckled hands grip the mini steering wheel, his gold wedding band a perfect accoutrement for his scrubbed whiteness. There's no traffic. I am aware of the apartment building, our windows facing the street, the red mouth of the tunnel where we park our bikes. We're easing past the houses, Mary Fragaile's brown two-story with the steep stairs and the creepy basement where her grandfather hung himself. The tires, weighted down, roll over the taut sewer covers, past anonymous station wagons and Mike Messina's yellow Road Runner with the horn that sounds just like the cartoon. "Meep meep."

There's Johnny MacALeavey's grey-shingled house. No one there. Silence.

We're at the corner of Newbold and Olmstead Avenues, the corner where the yellow brick Presbyterian church sits. What does Presbyterian mean? Isn't everyone a Catholic? I've never been inside the church but there's a massive stained glass window perfectly round that looks out over Olmstead. I sense it is a holy place, duller and more somber than our St. Helena's, with a small but fiercely loyal following.

This is the corner too, a block away from our apartment house, where we can spot the Mr. Softee truck on summer nights. He parks here to sell parfaits and cups of soft vanilla to the people in these apartment buildings, people we don't know because they live a whole block away. When you see the Mr. Softee truck idling and hear the calliope-like music you know you have just enough time to run inside and ask your parents for a quarter for a cone. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.

My dad turns left to head toward the highway.

"Well, we're off," he says. And that is that.

This is our first big move, the separation from the only things any of us have really ever known. My parents are leaving the neighborhood where they spent their entire lives, a crowded, lower middle-class collection of brownstone apartment buildings and two family homes with men sitting in chairs out front sometimes with beers and women leaning out the windows in black dresses year-round. The places moves to the rhythm of the subway trains thrashing on elevated tracks a block away. In front of the apartment building the Cross Bronx Expressway is the front yard.

For mom and Dad I figure this move is something special - an escape from all things Bronx, from their own pasts of drunken fathers, abusive mothers and teen pregnancies. There is something finally out there for them. My dad has this cool new job and some self-esteem, a reward for all his late nights going to college and working a second job. For mom it is a house, a real house they had had built with carpets and stairs and more than two rooms. She can clean and clean and clean. She's already told us she plans to build a white picket fence in the front to complete the picture in her head.

In the backseat we're coming at this from a different place. We're happy. What the hell do we know? We walk everyday during school to St. Helena's with a group of our closest friends. We play on the street right in front of the building, close enough for our parents to open a window and yell for us to come for supper - "get in here right now." We can see dad walk up the street coming home from work, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows in summer. Sweating from the subway and the walk.

This is something wholly different, a change we hadn't bargained for. Jimmy, Eileen and I hadn't really talked, but I suspect none of us really want to leave despite my parents' promises of new friends and schools, "other kids to play with," they call it, as if the ones we'd been playing with are somehow suddenly damaged or not good enough.

The worst part of it now as we head up Westchester Avenue is that I can see that no one really seems to care. The whole place - people and buildings and streets and sewers - is letting us go without so much as a tug at our sleeve. We are too young to do anything about it, but I am wishing someone could have protested, someone could have cried. No one did.

We're moving up 95 toward New Rochelle, then Connecticut then Rhode Island. Lots of awkward Indian-sounding names - Mamaroneck, Housatonic, Mystic. I don't know anyone in any of these places. They are strange names on a sign.

My parents don't say much to each other or to us. They seem lost in their own thoughts. The three of us kids sit quietly, the mop pressing into my legs. We pass Orchard Beach. Years before my mother had gotten mad at Mitzi the cat for shitting on the floor of our apartment and had ordered my dad to get rid of him. (Mitzi was misnamed - whoever had given him to us had named him before confirming his sex). My dad took us three kids and the banished cat in the car to some woods near Orchard Beach and we reluctantly left him there beside a tree with some food. When we got home my mother had experienced a change of heart and was sobbing. She ordered us back out to find Mitzi, who miraculously was still standing in the exact same spot when we returned. He gratefully accepted the ride back home and was never again banned.

I was hoping I could get a Mitzi too, that my dad was going to stop the car and turn around, telling us he'd changed his mind. Fuck Rhode Island, all five of us really belong in that two-room apartment with the steam heat and the rows of overflowing garbage cans and roaches in the huge dungeon of a basement.

No such luck. Mitzi settles in on the crowded floor at our feet. We are leaving the whole thing back there for good. Goodbye.

We are on the road to Rhode Island and I am thinking already how alone I suddenly am, and that it will stay this way for a long time to come. Probably forever. They are all gone now, Johnny, Emil, Mary, Diane. Nothing will replace them.

It is getting dark but the car window is still mostly unwound. It' cold. The wind blows my hair and it makes my face feels clean, renewed.

No one speaks to me but the red Dauphine. It knows of motion and impermanence and being so small in such a big place.

"Let it go, " it says, the tires whining north toward the darkness.

"Let it go Kevin. Walk away. This is what we do. "

In Rhode Island a year or so later, the Dauphine would die, felled by a blown piston along I-95. My dad would sell it to a junkyard for $25 and catch a train home.

Later that night we arrived in Coventry, Rhode Island. From the backseat the headlights showed us a small red and grey split level house gleaming, new, and as empty as anything I had ever seen in my life.

What I saw in the kindergarten picture

I recently read an excerpt from a memoir called The Night of the Gun by a writer named David Carr who works for the New York Times. Here's a guy who was a serious crack head and dope fiend, who slithered around in unsavory places with dark people, but ended up wearing a suit and writing for the Times. The hook in Carr's memoir is that he's a genuine newspaper reporter and he's managed to work his way through all this horrible shit - addiction and crime and paranoia - and now he wants to look back and figure out how he got to his current place in life from his past one.

So he uses his skill as a reporter to go back and find people who knew him and interviews them to find out what they saw in him back in the day, so maybe he can see some of it himself. Bottom line is that he wants to know not only how he made his grand personal shift, but what of his seedy past still remains in his shiny present.

When I first read that excerpt I was a little annoyed because I thought this dude had stolen my idea before I ever had a chance to develop it. I mean I was a reporter too and in trying to piece together my past I'd done a lot of Internet research and made some calls and sent some letters and at one point actually drive up to New York from Baltimore just to walk around my old neighborhood in the Bronx to see if, like a medium, I could pick-up a vibe of something, some spirit, some moment that I'd left there.

But in a moment of honesty and lucidity, I realized that old David Carr had not stolen a thing and I had no reason to resent him, though that rarely stops me from doing so.

In reality I was a reporter but a bush league reporter. No NY Times here. How about the Vandalia Drummer News and the Tipp City Herald near Dayton. Ohio? The other piece of the equation that lets Carr of my personal hook is that I don't really have to go on a heavy investigative journey to figure out what went wrong and to measure what pieces of my former self are still embedded in me. I think I already know.

I've poked around my past more in an effort to piece it together than to find clues. One gem I uncovered was a website called Bronx Board, an electronic message board for "misplaced, displaced and nostalgic ex-Bronxites." Amidst the nostalgic clutter are pages of old school pictures from parochial schools from the 1940s through the 1970s. I found myself there. St. Helena's grammar school kindergarten class of 1964, third row up, second from the right. Just the picture tells a story of who I am and where I came from. Thirty-four little five year-olds, all dressed immaculately in crisp white suits and lacy white dresses. The girls all wore white gloves and matching green and white bows and ribbons in their coiffed hair. The boys' hair was all slicked down with Vitalis. We wore white shirts, black bow ties and long ribbons pinned to our miniature chests that matched the girls' bows. Front and center sat Monsignor Scanlan, the then-patriarch of St. Helena's. He's an old italian priest resplendent in his monsignor dress uniform, black cassock and plum-colored accoutrement's.

I look at this and see not just myself, a cute little kid with reddish brown hair and an excited smile, but I see my parents and my neighborhood and my time. Back then there was a certain amount of order and respect. We were Catholics first and foremost, the highest-ranking priest even sat for kindergarten pictures with the kids (this was well before priests were sniffed out as potential creeps, and Monsignor Scanlan was no pedophile, I assure you). We were also aware of each other and respected the neighborhood and the school. At least parents did. There wasn't one kid in the picture with a hair out of place or a spot of dirt on their virginal whiteness. You can see behind the deep maroon curtain that served as a backdrop, mothers carefully combing and teasing hair, licking fingers to wipe smudges off freckled faces. The names were even within the small confines of the neighborhood. Irish and Italian period - Sullivan, Thornton, Camille Gargano and Frankie Starr. Greaseballs and Micks.

This is where I grew up, in a distant time where you followed the rules because they were there, no questions asked. And even if that very morning my mother had jammed bobby pins into my ears and made them bleed or screamed at me and pulled my arm nearly out of the socket as we left the apartment, I still showed up for school in dazzling white and still smiled for that camera and took my place behind the high ranking priest because this is how it worked. You did not air your laundry in public. No one was watching anyway, second or third generation immigrants living in brown apartment buildings and carrying their trash dutifully to the basement were not interested in your problems or your scars or your issues. You showed up for the class picture and took your place. You were clean and Catholic and quiet. That's all anyone would want to see.