My Mother Was Nuts Read Online Free

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    She could barely hide her disgust for anything to do with him. As a little girl, I liked to comb my father’s hair after he came home from work. It was my way of playing barbershop. It seemed to make my mother sick.
    “How can you touch him?” she would say. “Look at the back of his chair. It’s all greasy.”
    I would feel bad. And yet these were the good times. It would get worse before it got intolerable. They should have gotten divorced. But no, my mother believed that children from broken homes turned into juvenile delinquents. In other words, my parents stayed together so we wouldn’t end up in jail. Of course, with eighty-two locks on the door, we already were incarcerated.

CHAPTER 3
The Grand Concourse

    Penny’s childhood apartment building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx
Marshall personal collection
    I ’M GOING TO CALL the super!”
    I heard that all the time. The threat came from my grandmother, who was our building’s witch lady (every place had one), and it was directed at my girlfriends and me. My friends Rozzie, Rina, Wendy, Phyllis, and Natalie were all from the building. We played on the sidewalk or gathered in the courtyard on the Van Cortlandt side of our building and played King, Queen, Jack; Chinese handball; jump rope; and potsie, which is what we called hopscotch.
    However, the courtyard was beneath the windows in our living room and kitchen, where my grandmother sat and listened to her “stories” on the radio. She was hooked on the daily serials. As soon as she heard our voices rising up from the sidewalk—in other words, as soon as she heard us having fun—she opened the window and yelled at us. “Stop making noise. You kids better go away or else I’m going to call the super.”
    I ignored her. Most of my friends also lived with at least one grandparent, so they understood. She was a pain in the ass, as were most of the old people in the neighborhood. They were all spies. They pulled their bridge chairs out in front of their buildings and watched whateveryone did, or they stared out the window. I couldn’t do anything without my mother finding out.
Penny’s on the fire escape. Penny’s chasing the boys. Penny’s walking up on the roof. Penny’s playing in the gutter
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    For excitement, I watched for the knife sharpener and the I Cash Clothes guy (he bought old clothes from people). There was a guy with a horse and cart who came around and charged a nickel for rides along Jerome Avenue, which was still cobblestone (so going over the bumps tickled). The ice cream man was also popular. As soon as we heard the melody from his truck, all the kids playing outside would stop and shout up at the building. “Mommy! Mommy! The ice cream man!” Their mothers wrapped coins in napkins and dropped them out the window. My mother was one of the few who worked, so she was never home to drop down money. But not to be denied, I would run inside and steal quarters from her desk.
    I would also climb on top of the garage next to our building, retrieve the balls that had landed there during stickball games, and try to sell them back to the older boys playing in the street—that is, if the cops hadn’t already come and broken their stick and tossed it down the sewer, as was the practice that usually ended those games.
    If the weather was bad, we played inside. We skated across the marble lobby area, slid down banisters, bounced down the stairs on our butts, or pressed all the buttons in the elevators. Two boys once got in trouble for having a peeing contest in front of the mailboxes. Another time I heard that a man was exposing himself on the staircase. I ran as fast as I could to where he had been spotted but arrived too late to see anything. It was still exciting.
    Snow days were the best. I would go up to the sixth floor and hang out the windows of my friend’s apartment and watch the cars skid on the Grand Concourse. For me, that was an activity.
    I would have liked to hang out more