Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue A Child of the Fifties Looks Back

Chapter One Careful Parents My grandparents came from the two largest cities in Hungary -- Budapest and Debrecen -- in 1903. My mother and father were born and raised in Manhattan, and my childhood and that of my sister, Rhoda, were spent in the Bronx, so the great outdoors was not exactly in the lexicon of my urban parents, being a concept as alien to them as reading the catechism. The only hunting my father ever did was for bargains at Macy's, though he did bring home a copy ofField & Streamonce that he found on the subway, and read it on the toilet. When he moved his bowels he liked to price kayaks. My mother hated eating at outdoor barbecues and was particularly disgusted by insects, so when a picnic was unavoidable, she never packed rye bread with seeds, because the seeds looked like ants. She made a big deal about mosquito bites and the danger of infection, and I got the impression early on that the world outside our home was a dangerous place. Any contemplation of an activity that involved risk was discarded as foolhardy. As a result, I was not destined to be an explorer or a test pilot or an airborne ranger or a motorcycle daredevil. My mother and father were careful, cautious people; wary people. This ensured the certainty of careful, cautious children; wary children. In my sixteen years living in our apartment building, there was never a crime committed on the block. Nevertheless, when our doorbell rang, my sister and I were instructed to always ask: "Who is it?" and never open the door unless there was a response and the respondent was someone known to us. Anyone else had to be viewed through the peephole in the double-locked steel door. We lived on the sixth floor and viewed the world through well-placed window guards and stern warnings about leaning out too far. Parental invocations repeated over and over again like mantras became well absorbed and governed a good deal of how I dealt with my childhood world. This was, of course, their purpose. "Be careful, be careful, watch out, watch out, don't take any chances, it's not safe, it's not safe, that can take your eye out, stop that, you'll get hurt, you can lose a leg doing that, don't take candy from strangers." These were just a few. Not unexpectedly, caution became my modus operandi. My entire childhood was pervaded by endless warnings and pleadings and reminders of dire consequences: "Watch out for that lamp cord! If you're going out at night, wear white so the cars can see you! Never touch a light switch with wet hands! My God, don't cut that bagel toward your neck!" Statistically speaking, the possibility of severing one's head while slicing a bagel seemed remote indeed, yet Ben and Frieda Klein took no chances. Danger lurked everywhere. Even the garbage incinerator had a poster full of warnings promising five years in prison for throwing carpets or naphtha down the chute. I didn't even know what naphtha was, but I pitied those naughty souls in Sing Sing who were doing hard time for throwing it out with the garbage. I felt equally bad for those criminals who, in a fit of pique or defiance, had torn the tags off their mattresses. Yet it was their own fault, as they should have been forewarned by the clearly visible printed admonition. This atmosphere of constant vigilance and circumspection put a definite crimp in my activities. For example, it was the passion of the little boys on the block to act out the movies we saw every Saturday at the David Marcus Theatre on Jerome Avenue. Period pictures likeRobin Hoodand movies about pirates, the ones with dueling scenes, were special favorites. We would fashion swords out of appropriate pieces of wood or branches that we found where we played, in the vacant lots that would not be built on for another five years.Klein, Robert is the author of 'Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue A Child of the Fifties Looks Back', published 2006 under ISBN 9780684854892 and ISBN 0684854899.