You Can’t Take This Boy Outta The East Bronx

Lemme confess to not knowing the name of our New York City’s mayor. The Big Apple’s been my home town for 93 years. 

I’ve ridden the subways since I’m 6 or so, but no longer. Everyone warns  me not to walk alone, in Central Park or face a mugging. Don’t amble up Central Park West, either. You’re perceived as an old man, a wobbly cane at hand. 

I won’t be a captive in my own home town. That our Central Park West apartment is worth serious money has no meaning. Some 50 years ago I plunked down $72,500. Everyone told us we were crazy.

The Macy Day parade streams by our windows. Somehow, I get Santa to look up, throw me a big smile and wave. 

During the Great Depression, New York City’s schools from entry level through college were not just adequate, but first class. Our grade school classes were run by old maids, tough to the bone. God forbid you were inattentive. Our teachers in low heels and ankle length dresses would rush to your desk and give you a good shaking up. 

We were all sneaks and got our share of face slaps. The way I was told that I would skip seventh grade at the junior high was by my home room teacher yanking me out from my desk and warning me not to disgrace her judgment, ever. 

Somehow, Fiorello La Guardia, then our feisty mayor, found the capital to create great, special high schools. Bronx High School of Science, High School of Music and Art, and Stuyvesant still excel. Today, when I hear politicians whine that they can’t find the money to do such things I think of Fiorello. When there was a newspaper strike he’d read Dick Tracy, over the radio. Everyone tuned in. 

Not much crime during the Great Depression. I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 when I rode the west side train down to 125th Street from 161 Street. No incidents and all for a nickel. 

My father’s tailor shop stayed open til 9pm so mom would pack up a hot supper, which I delivered. Vicious crime didn’t arrive in Harlem until late forties, when heroin came in. Before that, everyone would stand around the sidewalk outside the bars and drink through the night. 

When I was 9, my father one night walked me over to one of those second storey music emporiums on 125th. Ben, my pop, told me to pick out an instrument I’d like to play. I chose a shiny nickel plated alto sax that cost $35. Pop paid for it a buck, weekly, and I got lessons for 25 cents the half hour. 

Hardly anyone so poor did as much for their kids. It opened up Music and Art high school for me and a side career in dance bands.

When I went for my union card in local 802, Petrillo, its feisty head, told me to paint a mustache on so I’d be accepted as of age when I went away to the mountains (The Borsch Circuit)

I never forgave Leonard Berstein for not choosing me for the solo glissando for clarinet in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Lennie, decades later, lived below us in the Dakota. He told me my clarinet was slightly flat, so I lost out. (Lennie had perfect pitch)

He was right because my piece had a crack in its neck section which is why I got it for $35. A new Selmer instrument then cost over $200. I never forgot this lesson. To compete you need the best instruments money can buy. Later, I bought a new Haynes flute for $200. Now sells in the thousands. 

I remember Dizzy Gillespie, whose suits my father cleaned and pressed. Dizzy invited me down to his midtown rehearsal studio, to sit in with his band. I was no match for Charlie Parker on the alto sax. They were riffing bebop which I’d never heard before. 

Dizzy sat me down and explained bebop, a derivative from the atonal symphonies composed by Jewish middle-agers in Europe. Everyone took care of each other in the Great Depression.

I thought of all this strolling north on Central Park West. Nobody takes my city away from this Bronx boy. I still feel the steaming heat in pop’s tailor shop. Mac, his black pressor, muttering “It’s too hard to live and too hard to die.”