looked me in the eyes but gazed down at the sidewalk as if she could see through it. She must have been hitting the bottle pretty hard, I thought. The Apple Annie’s one-time fine clothing, now gray, told a sad story of better times. Her cheeks had circles of pink rouge on them. She was a tragic caricature of a Ringling clown.
“You take care, ma’am,” I said quietly. Walking away from her, I stashed the apple in my coat pocket and imagined what her life must have been like before the Crash. I thought of my mother. I imagined if life had taken a few other tragic twists and turns and she, God forbid, was forced to sell apples on the street to strangers in order to survive. The image made me cringe. After another six blocks, I couldn’t walk any farther. Emotionally spent and completely drained, I sank into a bench at a bus stop.
It’s funny how memory works. You look back and remember some oddball things and not others. But I recall, as clear as a harvest moon over Waco Tanks, sitting there and staring at my long legs and huge feet resting in the gutter. Then I fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER 2
New Shoes
I can honestly say that I spent my life beating the odds. I was born prematurely in July of 1906 in Denver, Colorado where my father, mother, and older brother, Ben, had emigrated from Poland. My paltry three-and-one-half-pound birth weight frightened the family, who worried I wouldn’t survive. The special medical attention I required taxed my poor parents, who barely spoke any English. Although at times I’ve been certain it would have been much easier for everyone if I hadn’t, I did beat the odds, surprised the doctors, and survived. My birth was followed by the birth of my brother, Myer, in 1911.
In 1912, when the family moved to El Paso, I was an average, normal little boy who looked like any other six year old. My health was the last thing on my parents’ minds. I was wiry and fresh-faced, with a Milky Way of freckles. My mother told me I had inquisitive, friendly blue eyes that defined my soon-to-be-angular mug. My thick, wavy brown hair was neatly combed. I remember how Mama gave us our haircuts. She particularly complained about my hair: “That mane looks like a nest for a family of tecolotes (owls).” I loved how Mama made pictures with her words. In the Erlich family, you’d typically be treated to a complete spice rack of languages: Spanish, Yiddish, Polish, and heavily-accented English.
Mama’s exotic looks and jalapeño personality seemed to fit with a savory mixture of languages. She was full figured, had red hair, and sleepy blue eyes set deep in a face with a peaches-and-cream complexion. I’m sorry to say that her face would soon be marred by wrinkles of worry and crow’s-feet from too many sleepless nights.
The first inkling that things weren’t right with me came early one morning right after I turned seven. By then we were living in Sunset Heights.
“Look, Papa, look!” Ben roared as he and I raced down the hall and barged into the bathroom where my father was shaving.
“Where’s the fire?” Papa asked, his face full of shaving lather as he set his straight razor on the sink. Hearing Ben’s excitement, Mama came quickly from the kitchen, where she had been cooking breakfast, and gazed at the scene unfolding in our tiny bathroom.
“Look!” Ben demanded. We were positioned back to back with the somber countenance of rivals about to duel. It was plain to see that I stood two inches taller than my ten-year-old brother, Ben. “This isn’t fair. I’m supposed to be bigger.”
Mama and Papa didn’t seem happy. I remember that when Ben had gone through growth spurts they celebrated. They even recorded a history of those passages with a grease pencil on the bathroom wall. But this time things were different. My growth would never be a source of pride and delight. As I remember it, Mama and Papa looked worried. I took it all in.
I would soon also outgrow my mother. Within a year, I would outgrow my father as well. My parents didn’t scare easily. Papa had survived as a Jew in the Russian Army, faced down Boxers during the rebellion in China, and immigrated to the United States with twelve cents to his name. He’d worked in Rocky Mountain boomtowns like Leadville and Silverton, selling to silver miners out of a pack on his back. Mama was his equal. When my father left for America, she had to fend for herself in Poland, raising Ben on her own for two years until they had amassed enough savings to immigrate. In the face of crisis, my parents remained dignified and resourceful. But what they were up against with me was different.
It was right after they realized I was taller than my big brother that the incident with the shoes took place. Even though I was only about seven and a half at the time, I recall everything vividly. It was Sunday, at sunset. Shadows slowly draped the untamed cholla and tumbleweeds in my family’s backyard. Those shadows made their way through our borderland window above the apron-front farm sink and slowly robbed our little kitchen of light. That’s when Papa raised his voice. It seemed to me, hunkered in a kitchen chair, as I watched him pace back and forth like an interrogator, that he didn’t speak but roared.
“Are you sure those shoes don’t fit?” Papa stopped and peered down at me. He was strong but seldom stern. He had gentle blue eyes and the kind of good looks that turned heads. His first job in the United States was as an artist’s model. Papa had ridden in the Russian Cavalry and his presence on horseback was so striking that he stood out in the crowd. He had huge forearms and gentle hands with dexterous fingers, which suited him for his work as a watchmaker. His demeanor was formal but our family mostly knew him to be warm and loving. So I was startled when the thunder of his question bounced off the ceiling and walls and rattled the black cast-iron frying pan and the purple ceramic pot that hung next to the doorway. It’s funny how a parent’s anger can come back in an instant with a photo’s clarity.
For what seemed like an eternity, the only sound in that kitchen came from the tick-tocks of the handmade gingerbread clock on the mantle above the stone fireplace in the next room. Sitting there in the center of the kitchen, at the family’s secondhand tiger’s oak table, I avoided his eyes.
I remember squirming on the chair and picking at my patched, gray knee pants. They were held in place by cut-down black suspenders that originally held up my father’s, then my brother’s, trousers. The blue hue of my short-sleeved shirt had all but disappeared. My clothes were threadbare, but clean and well-pressed. The only part of my wardrobe that weren’t hand-me-down were my shoes, because my feet were bigger than my big brother, Ben’s.
“I can’t believe it. That’s not possible—your mother just bought them,” Papa bellowed.
The tone, rather than the words, wounded me. It was not a superficial injury, the type that came from tripping on one of the clumps of red caliche that dotted our unpaved street or from being thumped by an itinerant elbow from Ben. I’d heard my father speak harshly to others, but never to me; he didn’t have to.
I was an aware, sensitive boy, a good son, and a helper. I was the type of kid who would think before reacting, almost always measuring my responses; a young dam that cautiously released water to irrigate, not destroy, the valley below. I automatically tuned into what I thought others expected. That would become a real problem for me. I knew my parents had high hopes for their sons. Throughout my life, I’ve never wanted to disappoint them. Though I was only a child, like the desert tortoises in the nearby Franklin Mountains, I understood how to blend in. As a child of immigrants, that innate ability—one I would soon lose—served the family well. I was gentle, like my father; all the more reason to be upset by his uncharacteristic display of what I read as hostility. I never got into trouble. When Ricky Feuille invited neighborhood boys to play with matches and smoke Camel cigarettes behind the Bernat’s house, I was the only one to
