SHORT STORY  BY  RICHARD E. SCHIFF         
MY  LITTLE FRIEND   ©2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Story by Richard E. Schiff

city streets are a phenomenon of our development, created by people of periods long before any of ours, yet those streets are background and foreground to the lives of all who dwell on them, all who grow up on them.

A thought occurred to me when I contemplated the place I grew up. It may have been born of a consciousness raised in the person of a child to a maturity beyond his years. The geography of my hometown was a rough plateau forming the crest of the New Jersey Palisades; a mountain of granite that ran from the New York Harbor on the Atlantic Ocean all the way up river to Piermont in New York State.

With a general altitude of from 350 ft to 550 ft, the Palisades rise vertically from close to the water's edge. They’re the margin of a sill of diabase, formed by the intrusion of molten material, which hardened into a great sheet. Slow cooling developed the columnar structure; uplift and faulting occurred, it is believed, at the close of the Triassic period, and centuries of erosion ultimately exposed the cliffs.

This monument of the earth imposed itself in this writer’s mind. I could not help but view these antique architectural impositions, passing as houses and buildings, as simply situated atop this massive rock formation.

The block I‘m from was no different. Mostly stone or brick houses stood on one side of the two lane black asphalt boulevard named for Henry Hudson. On the opposite side of the Boulevard was what the residents across the street saw walking out of their homes, Roosevelt Stadium. The stadium’s walls were 50 feet high, scalloped and all concrete.

Named for the depression era President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was built as part of his New Deal policies that put America back on its feet. We children of that north New Jersey town had all our early sports experience there, and in the mid 1950’s, it was still a major venue for anything to do with spectacle or entertainment. It was very well used.

In the very early years of that decade, the cold war was just starting to rear its head; Joe McCarthy was just beginning to unearth what he branded a dangerous line of thinking among New Deal beaurocrats. He colored the times for certain.

McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee had early televised hearings. The American audience at home saw Joe McCarthy as irrational, irresponsible and dishonest.

During their session in December 1954, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him. "Machine Gun" Joe McCarthy never repented, but quickly descended into anonymity and alcoholism, but not before he destroyed the lives of many artists, and cleared the New Deal leftists from the Federal government. McCarthy died on May 2, 1957, at the age of 47.

Hudson Boulevard divided two communities that serve as gateway to Manhattan; the highway to the Lincoln Tunnel ran through them. North Bergen and Union City sat on the crest of the great palisades of granite that wall in the mighty Hudson River, wending its way forcefully around Manhattan and out into the North Atlantic.

Where we lived was "The Embroidery Capital of the World." Even at this writing there is an overhead sign declaring this, above the roadway off the New Jersey Turnpike, to the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.

My family lived on Hudson Boulevard across from Roosevelt Stadium. Our home stood 3 buildings east of 26^th street and was alongside a huge driveway, separating us from a 20 room mansion built in 1922. The driveway was in between this mansion and the house we lived in. At end of that sloping driveway, large enough to allow big trucks in and out, was Goldstein’s Embroidery Factory, a tall one story mill that employed close to 70 men and women, if my memory serves me well.

They were all fine people, much like my own parents and relatives, from those familiar backgrounds as German, Italian, Irish, Polish, Scottish and Armenian. Large groups of Cubans came when Fidel Castro nationalized Cuba under Communism in 1960. My tale takes place long before that shift in population took place.

The street just east of 26^th street was an alleyway hill street that had a mother of pearl button factory and a woman’s purse factory next to it, on the uptown side, and on the other side was a brick factory that made light bulbs. Cuba Street was named that after the Spanish American War in 1898.

We lived in a really nice brick building, with a long brick stoop that rose to a large porch, large enough to leave my Cousin Joan’s carriage on and still have room to move. Come to think of it, I was so small at this time that I could sit under Joan’s baby carriage with room to spare.

We are now in 1952. The cars slope at the back, mostly black, brown or grey, few colors. Kids like me wore brown and white and black striped polo shirts. There are fewer cars by more than half than there are at this writing.

The same way Camus’s Le Et’trange (The Stranger) experienced life and death in broad daylight, life on this rocky cliff top with its urban gown of pavement and asphalt seemed closer to the sun than the Moroccan desert, perhaps even brighter, clearer. Events were as though spotlighted by the sheer light of a mighty heavenly torch. Such clarity as only found in the eyes of a young human without reason for self denial or conventionality.

Most remarkable to me as narrator of this tale is that I was no older than 5 years old when this remarkable story took place. How I reacted or knew to react as I did I can not be sure of. I know that there was something wrong and I felt it as young as I was. That’s why I make so much of the clear light in which this awareness manifests itself in me. In maturity I am not a remarkable man, average at the best, even eccentric to my chagrin at times. But this child I remember being is a hero I never rose to in adulthood or maturity.

Goldstein’s Embroidery Factory employed many wonderful folks, and through my back yard fence they always said hello to me and were cheerful. Many of the sweet people would return to work from lunch and remember me in my yard and pass me a sweet through the fence much as you would feed an animal in a zoo. As I was somewhat chubby and knew to charm the sweet people to get those sweets, my Mother, a Lana Turner wannabee with bleach blond hair, saw my girth growing, finally put the workers together with the sweets and made this little chubby animal wear a sign reading "Please Do Not Feed This Child", so wonderfully without gender as to make my mom a pioneer of political correctness.

1952 was so long ago that it was the year King George the 6^th of England died, and his young daughter Elizabeth became Elizabeth II. My Aunt Helen won a contest for carving the Queen’s Coronation Coach in a block of Ivory soap. I recall seeing the coronation on newsreels in between films at the local movie theater. Perhaps I saw it also on the television only my grandparents could afford. Few of the families had TV then. My brother and I were always huddled up against the large radio in the parlor; we listened to Beanie and Cecil, Fibber McGee and Molly as well as Danger, Inner Sanctum and The Lone Ranger.

Mom not only admired Lana Turner but dragged me to every Turner film released. She was also fond of other movies and that year I saw Come Back Little Sheba and the Greatest Show on Earth.

So welcome to this very low key looking place, its brown, black and gray. That was 1952. There were very few patches of color; even the signs on the sides of the buildings were monochromatic.

Immense were the concrete walls of Roosevelt Stadium, imposing themselves along an entire city block or two, forming a round cornered arena inside. It was the largest open space anywhere in the township.

There were large old trees lining much of the Boulevard on the side where the houses stared open eyed at the stadium walls across the street. Our house featured a grand old Gingko whose broad leaves and the number of them offered grand shade from the otherwise blistering sun.

Vartanian was the name of the landlord who rented my family the house on the Boulevard. I don’t know anymore about the Vartanians than they were the Vartanians. That’s all I know or ever knew.

Their house was a two story brick building with a large brick porch that went steeply down to the street. To this day I have a worn out photo of me, my brother, mother, Aunt Helen, my little cousin Joan, and Aunt Beatrice It was taken in 1954, by Beatrice’s husband Leon.

All the good from my childhood, in spite of the circumstances of the society we inhabited, I recall as good and full of everything from Sunday School to High School, and for me it was the most perfect place to grow up, neither knowing nor wanting for a substitute. It was in this place and among its peoples that my moral tapestry was woven and even if this chemistry were only achievable with post WWII economic success it was a good place to grow.

No place occupied by people on this Earth is with out turmoil and aberration. Deviant minds roam the earth and nest in and out among the decent people. I choose not to discern the rationale for their discontentment but to tell you that our way of life only works for a very few at a time and never because it is so designed, but because of chance.

Our home was a wonderful place inside too. Aunt Helen was mom’s younger sister. She lived downstairs with her husband Victor and their daughter Joan. They shared a spacious railroad apartment on the first floor.

On the other side of the porch a small extension had been built that jutted forward to the edge of the porch front. It was a little cube of concrete with a real front door. It connected to a small apartment that had been added using the above ground cellar to make rooms. For the life of me I can’t imagine the layout. How could it have been more than 3 tiny rooms at best?

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Rampi were the well dressed tenants of this tiny abode. Mr. Rampi had a regular nine to five job somewhere; he left every day wearing a suit, a tie and a customary fedora hat. Mrs. Arthur Rampi, (I never learned her first name or sobriquet), left a minute or two behind Mr. Rampi, always in a smart lady’s business suit and hat. Both were in their mid to late forties.

There was nothing remarkable about them, nothing to make them stand out from others in the neighborhood except they were drunkards. They were the first people I heard that word Drunkards applied to. It was the reason for everything they did; in fact for life the Rampis became the mantra for Drunkenness in my sphere. They were The Drunkards to the adults in our home, their names sheer synonyms for their affliction.

How, you should ask, did we know this with certainty? Well, the Rampis were always friendly and loving when we would see them during the day or following work and dinner. Then we would see them walking hand in hand toward one local gin mill or another as there were so many you could access a bar walking in absolutely any direction.

Proof came as did warm pudding from an oven upon their return home. That’s when the fighting would start and involve loud yelling, dish breaking and much else to violate the decorum of any night in the year, holidays not excluded, always for certain. Christmas always included what seemed to be fisticuffs, both of them so slight and wiry, they seemed to equal one another in brute weakness, so the violence was anti climactic, always ending with meek whimpers, leading to sleep and the next morning’s routine.

Party Lines were the Phone Company’s pioneering Privacy Invasion scheme, and it was both common and acceptable for people in 1954. For anyone who does not recall, Party Lines meant that you and two or three neighbors shared access to one telephone line. If you picked up the phone in your flat and heard the next door neighbor talking to their relative you simply, quietly laid down the phone set and waited till you found a dial tone. We were all in less of a hurry, could trust our neighbors, and were not nosy back then.

Technology ruled my older brother Walter. He was a ham radio operator and an electronic genius. What with his being the youngest boy, at 16, to receive the Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America he was the best brother any man could boast. He spent most of his free time at the stores that lined the now gone Van Cortland Street in New York, which was demolished to build the former World Trade Center Towers. There a smart young Tom Edison like Walter could buy used electrical parts, motors, tubes, meters, telegraph keys, two way radio army surplus and more.

The neighbors, the Marinos, had a teen aged daughter, Loretta, Walter took a sweet to. He wanted to be able to talk to her at will. Not to be miffed, Walter ran a real wire out the window and into the Marino house next door and created a push to talk radio box he mounted on the wall over the staircase on the top floor in our apartment. As I was best friend with Loretta’s little brother I used to talk to Bobby a lot.

The big brownstone mansion on the opposite side of the driveway belonged to an unscrupulous Doctor Armand Ajamian. He had his nefarious clientele among the many hoodlums of Hudson County back then. This was the mob doctor you brought the gunshot wound to, and worried not about a police report.

Walter and I were privileged to overhear our dad, Lenny, and Uncle Vic talking on the porch one spring night.

"Did you see that car pull up at the Doctor’s house," Lenny said, lighting a Herbert Tareyton cork tipped cigarette he held in his lips.

"Yeah, I did," Vic lit a lucky. "That was a gangster Lenny; nobody comes in and screeches to a stop, unloads a half dead man and takes off again wheels spinning if he ain’t a crook."

"I heard on Journal Square he has a reputation, from before and after the war," Lenny puffed on his cigarette, wearing only his white t shirt. It was after 10 pm and he had been home from his job at the shoe store a half hour.

Uncle Vic was English by ancestry and wore his jet black hair straight back on his head with the help of Vitalis Hair Oil for men, I bought him every year on his birthday for 70 years. "This clown won all kinds of scrambled eggs for doctoring in the war, and now he’s doin’ this."

"There’s dough in this, Vic," Lenny said. "That’s all anyone cares about anymore Vic."

Looking up at Lenny, who was slightly taller, Vic said in that way he had, "So, what else is new?"

Doctor Ajamian rented out the twenty or more rooms in the old stone mansion he owned. Large decorative fountains on the lawn spoke of a golden age when this place first opened in 1922. It was built by the Ermetti Bros., early electrical contractors who electrified Hudson County at the early part of the 20^th century. Now it was in slightly run down condition. Very poor people rented rooms form the Doctor. Among them a young blond mother, all alone with no husband, not too common then.

This frail, soft mannered woman had a daughter my age, who I shall call Anna, as I do not recall her name through the haze of 54 years. Anna was my little friend from our first meeting. I was too young to understand why I liked Anna. No doubt it was for the same reason we like members of the opposite sex at every stage of our lives, though in my and Anna’s case we were pre-pre-pubescent and the idea of connecting as we did was no doubt genetic but completely platonic at the age of 4.

From the moment I met her she was my constant companion. We played together. She was fun and sweet and so was I as a four year old. In this story my personality is unformed; I serve as the lens through which a tale of an age gone by can nestle in the mind of a modern reader.

The fountains outside the Doctor’s House worked for the last time that summer and Anna and I played in the cooling water as spring became summer on that strip of concrete and asphalt. We were so small we used the fountains to wade in. The water was so cool on our frail white bandy legs. Anna and I were friends, little playmates.

Poor people like us and those even poorer renting in the Doctor’s house had no air conditioning, none at all in those days. Movies were cooled by what they billed as "Cooled by Refrigeration" with letters capped with snow on banners hung from their marquees.

Summer meant heat. No doubt it got very hot in the Goldstein Embroidery Company factory out back. When the workers came out in the steady parade up the driveway for lunch they were fanning themselves as most of them lit cigarettes. At lunch time I was usually in my own back yard. I knew the workers, not all of them by name, but most of them by look and attitude of posture or locomotion.

Others rented from the Doctor. Roosevelt Stadium elected in 1954 to install brand new fancy modern electric lights on very tall steel poles to replace the old wooden telephone poles with their wood frame light bars. My mother had a spare bedroom she rented to boarders in those days. That’s the subject of another tale but as the room was vacant, Mom had a FOR RENT sign on the front door. As fate has it, Mr. Jack Herger, employee, maybe job boss of the crew from North Carolina up here to install those new lights, spies Mom’s sign and comes ‘a calling.

It was a very warm day in late June when a tall lanky man with short brown hair, wearing no hat and shirt, jeans unseen in the north then and never on a grown man climbs the steps of the old brick porch and makes a beeline for the sign in the front door glass, that reads "Room For Rent, See Queenie. Upstairs Bell." Showing under his pants leg was the unmistakable shapes of cowboy boots no man outside of the Ringling Brothers Circus wore in 1954, except in movies.

He reached out his tan and bony arm that showed his muscles when he rang the bell labeled "upstairs" forcefully with his right forefinger.

"Hold on there, be right down," came the voice of my mother from the upstairs landing, leaning hard over to peer down at the door. From that angle she saw it was a man.

The caller could hear the sounds of her heels descending the stairs sidesaddle as she held fast to the banister in her haste. Once down she opened the door as you only could back then with absolute impunity, with out fear. When it swung open and Mom looked up and saw this lean, tan cowboy on her porch she veritably stammered, "Can I - can I help you?"

Looking sown at my small mother the caller said, like a dark Gary Cooper, "Hello, my name is Jack Herger and I am looking for a place for me and my family while we are up here putting new lights in that stadium there," he said pointing behind him at the stadium wall.

"I couldn’t help but see this sign in your window here," he said pointing at the cardboard sign.

"Well it’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Herger, my name is Queenie and I am only renting a single room nothing big enough for a family." The disappointment was evident in her demeanor.

"Well, Queenie, have you any suggestions as to where we could find something?" Jack hopefully drawled.

Mom thought a minute and then clicked, "See the big house there?" pointing off the porch to her left at the fountains and yard of the Doctor’s House, the place my little friend Anna lived. They had multiple rooms for rent, many already furnished. Jack thanked Queenie and promised to let her know the moment they were settled.

Herger turned from the door and trotted down the stairs heading directly across the driveway right up the stairs to the porch of the Doctor’s House and in through the lobby and knocked directly on the Office Door.

There came a sound not customarily associated with a doctor’s Office, a sound like something being dragged, but as soon as it was it was gone. The door opened suddenly and Jack moved slightly back from the doorway.

A very dark man, dark slicked back hair, dark moustache and a dark striped suit had opened to Jack; it was the good Doctor Armand Ajamian himself.

"May I help you, I am Dr. Ajamian, and I own the building and rent the rooms. Is it just for you or are there others?"

"Me and the wife and two young kids, well behaved, need it for about 4 months as I see it. Kids will start school here and then we go back to North Carolina." Jack said.

As Jack was able bodied, had family expecting him to succeed in landing them a roof over head that night, he rustled up some real rooms in a real nice place next door to a "real person who would help his wife" meaning my Mother.

Indeed Queenie would not just help the Hergers find their rooms, but also find reasonably cheap furniture found at a local moving and storage firm. Now my mother was making trips next door to the Doctor’s House with me alongside, I to visit Anna, she to visit Mrs. Herger.

No memories have I neither of Anna’s last name, nor of her mother’s name maiden nor wed.

But I remember Anna! She was a sweet girl of only 4 years endurance as I was a little boy of an equal age. The hard part of telling this tale is that I was so young I can barely imagine what my demeanor was or my vocabulary or even what process my thinking took at such a tender age.

Summer dress for tykes like us was athletic shirts to keep us cool, what with our immeasurable energy and need to expend it even on the hottest of summer days. I wore my plain brown hair in a close crew cut from Lindy the Barber on Summit Avenue. Anna’s thin blond hair hung in moist wringlets upon her forehead and in tiny yellow wisps as it hung from her head.

What could our play have been but childlike meanders within the limits of our allowable borders; don’t cross any street, don’t talk to strangers, know your address and phone number to tell a policeman. What little we knew of the world I think we took in with every eyeful and breathfull which was, after all, the primal stuff of learning.

Balancing on a ledge of garden bricks raised to protect flower beds was a cliff walk and dangerous to all who will undertake this circus act, but young animals, young humans who rebound from calamitous falls with the tenacity of cats fallen from heights.

As to talking to strangers, there were few to worry about. All of us kids who lived near the Goldstein Embroidery Factory had a good knowledge of his crew, knew most of them by some means of identification or another. A stranger would have stood out like a sore thumb, or so it seemed to me when I wrote this down the first time. Now I realize a new face can slide in and before you have time to smell a rat they are perfumed with the smell of the herd and then they cease to be strangers.

Of all the men and women who toiled in that embroidery mill, there was one fellow who I think always stood out from the crowd. One, he did not actually work in the factory but drove a small panel truck for the boss, and made small drops and deliveries, maybe sometimes came in with a few loads of thread, for the machines.

On more than one occasion I peeked inside and even got to go in once, for what I do not recall. I remember huge machines fed with rows of colored thread spools mounted above and feeding thread to the needles doing the real work on broad expanses of fabric below.

This was where most of the army patches for the Korean War were made; we all had great assorted samples from the discards and seconds.

That fellow Pete the driver was a gem. He always wore a brown leather Eisenhower jacket and a brown Fedora to match. More than not he’d wear tan khaki pants and brown leather shoes.

He was thin and always had a refreshing smile for all he met including me. I really looked up to this guy. I think it was his marked independence. Pete did not work in the factory, but for the factory and kept more freedom than any other man I knew at that time.

So one day I noticed him, he was new, and small but full framed, well built and about 25 years old I learned later. He wore dark clothes unlike the rest of the workforce, they all decked out in their lightest clothes and summery frocks. He looked less finished, less clean, well, less enfranchised by all we took for granted as community. This newcomer to the cliff was a loner. I noticed he had not made friends with anyone else and was not seeking out any either.

What I did not know was that he was deviant.

But let me tell you, when you experience many people at an early age, and they are all munificent and hard put to harm you it is easy to misread the actions of one so diversely created as to be one who revels in anguish, especially the anguish of others. Something also in every healthy animal before they must take action larger than their willingness to exert themselves is categorical denial when the signs are flexible enough to permit this delusion.

I did begin to fear his difference, but being a small child few would pay any attention to me because my intelligence was not formed enough to communicate my precise fears and they would come out all wrong like fear of an invisible monster neath the bed.

No doubt my fear was for my own safety when I truly accepted that his behavior was so unlike all the others. The other adults could be trusted and this stranger could not.

Then I realized his fascination was not with me.

Maybe I had a moment of respite but I cannot recall, for in that very realization I knew for certain his designs were on my little friend, Anna.

Now I was terrified. Paralyzed describes how I felt when this realization of evil intent threw its hairy arms over my consciousness and send me into a kind of shock.

The Stranger had a habit of loitering around the driveway, till after the other workers left. This was once of those afternoons. Anna and I were swimming in the fountains and our tiny clothing stuck to us wet like our bodies. We giggled as children do. From the corner of my eye I saw The Stranger walking toward us calling out.

"Little Girl?" in a soft, but coarse voice. He smoked, his camels were rolled up in his
t-short sleeve like young toughs often did back then.

"Don’t talk to him, Anna!" I said.

She did not respond to me. She was poorer. Had she not been taught not to talk to strangers? She seemed fascinated, smiling, maybe she thought him the father she did not have but next thing I know she is out of the fountain and going to this man.

"Anna’" I called out.

The Stranger bent down and whispered something to Anna, promising her what? Then as he turned and started walking hand in hand with Anna up the Boulevard toward the Duro Test plant. That was when I saw the huge blades of a fabric cutter’s scissors sticking out of his back pocket. I was in terror.

It was then that Pete the driver turned sharply into the driveway and saw me.

"What’s up Kid?" he asked.

"That man is taking Anna, he has a scissors", I knew scissors as my mom was a tailor.

Pete took one look and yelled, "Hey you stop now!"

The Stranger turned around, dropping Anna’s little hand, and was frightened to be discovered at all, nonetheless by Pete.

Pete reached inside his truck and beeped the horn which brought my mother to the upstairs front window.

"Call the cops, Queenie," Pete called to my mother.

She leaned her head out surveyed the scene, pointed at the Stranger and said, "Him?"

"Yeah, him," Pete confirmed.

With that the Stranger took off, but he had a limp, maybe a war wound, who knew and it happened a police cruiser, the County cops were nearby and caught the Stranger.

Turned out The Stranger was no stranger to the police. He had a record that included child abuse and they were thankful that this one was interrupted and the cops told my Mom that if it had not been for my quick wits and all that, little Anna, my little friend might have met with a more unpleasant end.

I wish I knew what I had saved her for, but her mom was so poor she was evicted from the Doctor’s House at the end of that summer, and I never knew what became of Anna ever again. That fall the caravan of gypsies arrived and stayed at the Doctor’s House all through the Fall.

I will never forget that day, and perhaps, now, neither will you.

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