said he walked twelve blocks to save the cost of a streetcar ride and arrived in front of a brownstone building. He climbed four flights of stairs and knocked on the door of the Black Forest Watch Repair Company. A heavy, German-accented voice answered and bid him to enter.
“Herr Vogelsong stood there,” he said, “peering at me over iron-framed, pince-nez glasses. He picked up a piece of brass, put it in front of me, and handed me an engraving tool—a scriber. Then he uttered four words:
“‘Draw a straight line.’”
Mr. Buck said he spied a straight edge lying on a nearby desk and reached for it. Almost instantly Vogelsong had grabbed it and smacked him across the knuckles.
“‘Draw a straight line.’”
He said he felt stupid but finally realized what the man wanted. He held the brass block steady, took the scriber, and bore down. As he moved it across the soft metal, he could tell the line was far from straight, and soon he felt the sting of the straight edge again on his hand.
“I sat back and looked at him,” he said. “He was smiling through his goatee and mustache. I stared at that block of brass, closed my eyes, and tried something I had never done before. I tried to focus myself.
“My right hand seemed to move of its own volition and when I looked down, there was a straight line!”
As Mr. Buck spoke those words, I saw Paolo’s face lose its smile. He stared at the old man. Then he got off the stool, shook Mr. Buck’s hand, and walked out of the shop without me.
I didn’t see much of Paolo except in class after that day. He seemed quieter and didn’t fidget as much. Angie joked that he must have found a girlfriend. This from a nine year old!
I had another one of those alone Saturdays toward the end of the school year, and once again I walked past the business district, waving at Mr. Ruddy, as he cut and shaped a new heel for a shoe. I smiled at Mr. Huff, as he turned the large lathe holding the rotor of an industrial motor to repair its coils.
It was still early—about seven-thirty in the morning—but plenty was already going on. Mornings served proprietors and customers well. This early in the day, the heat hadn’t yet set off the odors of the tenements. And the doors stood open to the evanescent breezes that served as the only source of air conditioning back then.
When I came to Mr. Buck’s shop, I had to blink as if to confirm what I saw: Now there were two gnomes sitting side by side at the workbench. Mr. Buck was one—and Paolo was the other.
I watched and listened, as the old clockmaker first pointed out different things and then observed, and the boy followed his directions. He smiled approval and Paolo smiled back.
I didn’t understand, until a customer walked in and called, “Is this Raphaele Bachanale’s place?”
Mr. Buck rose from his stool, came forward, and looked at the man.
“I am Raphael Buh-buh-buh-buccinelli.”
Tick-tock.
The Coal Man
The coal man arrived one peppermint November day.
I awoke in the chill of a Saturday morning, the cast-iron radiator in my bedroom colder even than the air creeping through the cracks in the rotting window frame—nothing unusual for the decaying buildings in our neighborhood. Today one would call the city’s housing office, and the bureaucrats would drag the absentee landlord downtown and threaten him with fines and court orders, unless he turned the heat on. But in those days the landlord stayed warm in his distant, well-kept neighborhood, fearing only the wrath of his demanding, overweight wife.
Mama and Papa remained in bed, enjoying the respite from work and the luxury of two bodies lying warm together under a patchwork, homemade quilt. But ten-year-old boys were driven by different instincts, and I was no different.
I had slept in my long underwear, having learned that my room would grow icebox cold. Then, in the morning, it was relatively easy to grab my worn, corduroy pants from the floor, slip them under the blankets, and slide my legs inside. A few minutes of shivering to warm both them and me, and I would proceed to the secondhand, argyle socks Mama had gotten for pennies at the charity outlet in the church basement. Quickly checking my brown brogans to shake out any roaches wanting to set up housekeeping, I would shove my head into an outsized, pullover wool sweater. Now fully dressed, I was ready to face my world.
Most kids in my neighborhood, if they made it to adulthood, would remember the wonders of Saturday morning cartoons and serials at the neighborhood movie house. I never had the twenty-five-cent admission fee to the all-cartoon, all-morning shows at the Empire Theatre, so my weekend entertainment was self-made. I knew that Angie and Tomas, my best friends, faced the same predicament, and my first job was to hunt them down.
I savored the crisp air. My pre-pubertal body easily warded off temperatures that would send older folks shivering to the nearest heated building. But I was a kid, invulnerable and immortal. I never worried about the weather. So when I saw the steel-gray sky signaling the impending snow season, my only thought was that it would be a white Thanksgiving.
The marquee at the Empire touted the Saturday cartoon show. In less than an hour hundreds of kids would be lined up, pennies, nickels, dimes, and sometimes quarters at the ready, pushing and shoving to be the first to enter the maroon, velvet-lined movie house with its prized balcony seats. Where else could you watch a movie, chew gum, and throw spit balls, all for a quarter?
But for me this particular heaven was off-limits. So I whistled as I walked past, catching a glimpse of the name of that week’s attraction emblazoned on a poster in the display window: “Sergeant York,” starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan.
That was it! My mind raced and I began to run. Angie and Tomas also lived in tenements, four-story, sooty-gray, stone fronts that must have been nice a hundred years ago. Now they held the overflow of the refugees escaping war-torn Europe.
They saw me first and met me halfway down the block. We were twins … no, triplets in appearance, our couture direct from church rummage sales and giveaways, the conscience-salving gifts of the well-to-do.
“Whadda we gonna do, Berto, hmmm?”
I grinned. Angie often tried to imitate Jimmy Cagney when he talked.
Tomas remained quiet. He was an overly thin kid, a follower who later got himself killed by following the wrong crowd. Come to think of it, so did Angie—but that’s another story. He just found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, when another kid’s knife slashed his throat.
“The Old Guys are probably already putting away Rheingolds at Mr. Ruddy’s. Bet their stuff beats anything at the Empire.”
That was our name for the three elders who had fought in the Great War, friends who had left the confines of our neighborhood and enlisted in 1917 to fight the Huns: Harold Ruddy, George Huff, and Tim Brown.
Twice a week, they would meet in Mr. Ruddy’s shoe-repair shop and relive old memories, killing off as many Rheingold soldiers as they could. And on the days when we had no school, chores, or other things like baseball to distract us, we would sit, wigwam style, on the floor and listen to the three recount their days of glory. Like most boys of the era, sometimes we picked up the empty brown bottles and let any remaining
