ESPERANZA

BLISTERING heat...the kind of day that the air is so thick with humidity, you kinda feel like you’re swimming, y’ know? I mean, even the flies buzzing around me are dragging ass - that’s how  freakin’ brutal it is. I’m doing my best to mop up the ever-streaming torrent of sweat spewing down my forehead with my trusty bandana, as I trudge lethargically down Broad Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey. The year is 1976.

  Suddenly - hoooly shit!! Wow! What is this - a fuckin’ mirage?! I wipe the sweat from the lenses of my hated Benjamin Franklin glasses, thinking perhaps they might be altering my vision - and put them back on. No, no it’s not an illusion at all! There, standing right on the other side of the picture window of the Tijeras de Oro beauty salon, cutting hair - is the most breathtaking creature I have ever encountered in all of my 16 years on this earth! The sheer essence of femaleness...an older woman too, maybe 19, 20 years old.

 I cannot move...cemented in my tracks - unable to look away.

  Caramel colored skin, long brown curly hair, tinted blonde - AND the most AMAZING full lips. Pink lips. I don’t know if they’re just naturally that color or it’s  her lipstick - but they are perfect. Even all that, however, pales in comparison to her truly major asset - hazel green eyes. Hypnotizing green eyes. How could that combination even be imaginable?! It should be against the law - that’s what it should be!

   As if this wasn’t all enough - her body is as if it had been invented by a group of mad scientists at the Playboy mansion! On top of that - she is wearing these incredibly tight white jeans - with red stiletto heels - to match her pink halter top.

Whew!

THE TRIALS OF WEATHERBEE H. PEABODY

  It was over. I mean, we have NO chance - Skinny and me, that is. The year after The Pilgrim Girl was unceremoniously pushed into the mud on Thanksgiving Day, the previously very white Roselle High is forcefully racially integrated - happening to coincide with mine and Skinny’s first year there. It’s 1973 - and Roselle is finally and forever changed.

  Even though we’re Sicilian (Skinny and me) and come from Brooklyn, and at least have some frame of reference for this - as opposed to all these Opies surrounding us - we’re still just puny little kids. Compared to these guys, anyway. I mean, most of them, they’re like grown men already. It’s like black Vikings invading the school. It was swift and it was total, and just like that, our innocence, or whatever the hell it was  - is gone. Snap.

   We didn’t really understand, but it felt like living under  the Kremlin, or something. There was no point in trying to escape or resist, we just have to take our lumps...especially me, since for some reason, I am put into the class for the criminally insane. So, we’re pretty much just quivering pats of butter. That’s where Weatherbee H. Peabody comes in. Weatherbee is this fictitious character derived from our imaginations. He is this kid from England who is driven to school every day by his chauffeur in a limousine - he wears black framed glasses, and a tuxedo to school every day - and does snuff. And refuses to take gym class.  I mean, subconsciously we know this is beyond absurd - but it had to be done!

  So we start spreading this around -  it’s almost, like, subliminal messages,  or something. There’s  a lot of nice black kids among the assassins also  - and one this kid, Keith Bailey, is  one of our confidants.

   “Oh yeah, I seen that mofucka in gym class - he be wearin’ black socks and shoes, an’ shit with his gym shorts - mofucka be crazy an’ shit!’

Pretty soon, it’s like wildfire around the school (particularly among the black kids, who find this thoroughly intriguing) and everybody is claiming they’ve seen him.

“Man, I seen that mofucka doin’ snuff an’ shit while he be waiting for his chauffeur, then the mofucka gets in this limo!” Another kid declares.

It becomes  such a must see attraction that finally, a group of the black kids threateningly confront Bobby Gibb, a friend of ours, claiming they’ve never seen him.

  “Oh, they put him in remedial reading!” He blurts out quickly, saving his ass, and for reasons unknown that seems to satisfy the angry mob.

At last, Skinny and me are laughing again.

THE PILGRIM GIRL

It’s Thanksgiving Day 1970 in Roselle, NJ. Our family just moved here from Brooklyn, NY a few months ago. I look out the second floor window - and gasp in a combination of disbelief and - horror!

     “Ma...Ma! C’mere for a minute! Just a minute...ya GOTTA see this…”

She comes over as we both stare out the window. The girl across the street...she’s dressed as a Pilgrim. Yeah - a PILGRIM! Swear to God! Not only is she dressed as a Pilgrim - she’s carrying a wicker basket full of corn and pumpkin gourds - and is making her rounds to the neighbors!

    “What the hell?”

I mean, I have no frame of reference for this kind of stuff...no context. And I’m only barely 10 years old. Even my mother is kind of flabbergasted, although she tries to look for the silver lining in the situation.

  I mean - this is 1970, for crissakes! The Vietnam War is still raging! Protesters are still marching! American flags are still being burned! There’s still hippies - and maybe most important - the seething racial tensions that have erupted into riots pretty much all over the country. They were particularly rough in Brooklyn the last couple of years. That’s one of the reasons we left our Italian neighborhood there, and moved out here. My aunt and uncle and cousins came here the year before - and we followed - right over the Verrazano Bridge.

  Roselle is only like 19 or 20 miles from our Brooklyn neighborhood, but it might as well be another civilization, y’know? It’s like the 1940’s here, or something...I don’t know how that could even possibly be since we’re surrounded by ghetto towns. Newark, Elizabeth, Rahway...the Negro lawn jockey in front of this house on the drive over here from Brooklyn...man,  that’s  the first thing that freaks me out - now a Pilgrim girl?!

  Her name is Prudence Fink, she lives right next door to my cousins across the street, she’s got this bright red hair, and two inch thick glasses - and apparently, she’s been doing this for years! I am speechless...it’s beyond my ability to understand.

   Now, fast forward to Thanksgiving Day 1972 - Prudence is outside her house once again dressed in her Pilgrim finery, ready to make her appointed rounds...suddenly a group of black girls surround her from out of nowhere.

    “Shit bitch - you ain’t even no mo’fucking Pilgrim!”

With that, they begin jostling her between them, finally pushing her down on the lawn - and her face in the semi-mud. Change was coming to Roselle, New Jersey

THE CALLING

It was - like - a...a...CALLING! Yeah! A calling - that’s what it was!! One of those rare moments, it maybe happens once in a lifetime....that changes your destiny - FOREVER. I’m talking about me and my cousin Skinny. A divine intervention that could have only occured in the 1970s.

  The wig head - that’s how it all starts. Y’know those styrofoam heads they put the wigs on, right? Well, both our mothers wore different wigs for special occasions...we never thought anything of it until this one day. We look at the wig head - and simultaneously we know what we have to do...what we are meant to do!

  Borrowing some paint from my sister’s watercolor pad, we paint it like a light brown - it’s already got a nose on it, we find an old pair of  reading glasses, one of his mother’s old wigs, and a baseball cap - and - WALA - it is TRULY a Michelangelo moment - DaVinci - maybe. E This surely has transcended anything we have ever done before. Now we need a body.

      “Hey - let’s break into the Webb’s house - and steal Daniel’s clothes!!”

I don’t know why exactly we have to take his best Sunday clothes, but it’s pure inspiration! Sneakers and gloves soon follow. When we stuff the clothes full of newspaper to create the body -  and then attach the head - well...this is the start of something BIG - really big!

    “It’s alive! Alive! We howl with glee. ( Well, actually, that was the scene from the original Frankenstein movie - but we have vivid imaginations).

    “What should we do with him?!”

    “Let’s lay him down on the side of 3rd Avenue!”

    “ Yeah! During rush hour!”

    “With a knife in his chest!”

    “Yeah! And blood trickling down his chest! We can use Heinz Ketchup!”

    “And A bike lying down right next to him!”

    “Yeah! Hahahahahaha…..

After causing a HUGE commotion and traffic jam on 3rd Avenue - our wildest dreams come true. An ambulance comes screeching down the street, sirens blaring - and thumps to a halt right in front of our dummy! An older guy - an EMT - with an oxygen tank springs out of the vehicle. Within a second or two, he realizes it’s actually a dummy and an angry, baffled scowl creases his face as he puts his hands on his hips, searching the area for the culprits.

  Skinny and me crouch behind the bushes on his front lawn, covering our mouths to suppress our laughter.  A minute later, he jumps back into the ambulance and tears away.

 Me and Skinny never laughed so hard in our lives.