Bringing It All Back Home Read Online Free Page B

really small world. [The] same kind of hermetically sealed feel that you had in some bad ghettos, you know. So you didn’t feel poor, because nobody had much. I mean, you could play ball and make people move their car if it was on the corner.
    They lived and played on the street:
    John: The fucking house was so hot.
    Denis: There was no such thing as a playdate.
    John: [ Laughs. ] That didn’t exist. The playdate was “Get the fuck off of that.” My mother wouldn’t let us stay in the house, because we would wreck it. So we’d go out and come back in when it’s dinnertime.
    John continues:
    It was a neighborhood, as my brother Pete described—but it’s very accurate—that the Depression never left. It was a place that never got to boom time, postwar, or any of that. So it was factory and dockworkers, essentially; some civil servants. I mean, we didn’t know any white-collar people hardly.
    As boys from the neighborhood became men, they sometimes did better than their parents, moving into civil service or back-office jobs on Wall Street or becoming police officers or sanitation workers or taking other uniformed service jobs.
    Denis portrays his brother John as a young man who dreamed of moving beyond Brooklyn and beyond the Staten Island housing project where they lived for a time. He recalls John reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly , the New Left magazine Ramparts , and Paul Krassner’s Realist as well as newspapers like the Daily News and The New York Times . To Denis this seemed very unusual for a seventeen-year-old.
    He had this sense of history about Vietnam when it happened that it was the biggest event of his generation.
    He was really smart and I was a fuckup. I mean, school for me was a big pain in the ass, and I was more interested in chicks and sports and eventually drugs and everything else. But Johnnie became very politicized during the war. He was in his teens. We’d go to these meetings in church basements in Bay Ridge. I remember going to one where there was a guy from the Green Berets speaking to all the pink-faced men in Bay Ridge and Johnnie stood up in the middle of them all and told them what [he] thought about it, the war. He stood up in this room full of guys and he was booed down and the people were telling him he was a pacifist and a punk and all that kind of stuff. I remember that very clearly.
    John recalled the same incident:
    I said, you know, “I don’t think this is such a great idea.” I didn’t think that we had the justification yet, you know. It was “Show me.” Weeks later, John joined the military, thinking he might as well see for himself. And there were other influences as well.
    You want to run away from home when you’re seventeen, you know. That’s part of it. And it is a rite of passage in America, isn’t it? I mean, in Brooklyn to, you know, join the military.
    I was a sophomore in high school the day Kennedy got killed, and four years later, to the day, I was in Vietnam. So, you know, after Kennedy and when that started, I said, “This is going to be the defining moment. There’s no question about it.” This country’s never going to be the same, the world’s never going to be the same, and it’s like missing the last boat; you know, in a way I thought it was, you know, our generation’s event. I didn’t feel such an obligation so much as I felt a sense of wanting ownership of the facts of it, you know, to be able to say, “I know what this is about. I don’t speculate about it. I don’t have opinions. I have experiences.”
    For Denis, John’s choice was enormously painful:
    I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I wept because it was the end of our childhood. I mean, it was, we were just getting into marijuana and the Beatles and, you know, and Donovan and Dylan and all of that and the ’60s were here and we were having a great time and he was