I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [14]
My oldest friend since the age of eight, Jimmy Comiskey, ca. 1951 (image credit 2.1)
My closest peers and mentors at the time were, first of all, Jimmy Comiskey. Jimmy was a scholar, an intellectual, a bookworm. History, religion, arts, philosophy, the esoteric, occult, and macabre were his passions. We would meet in Jimmy’s book-filled room, our intellectual clubhouse, and tell stories. A plan was hatched to acquire a complete set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. How? Steal them. We would need a front man—Johnny “Golden” (aka John Wanamaker) was recruited—why? With his slender build, blond hair, and baby-faced blue-eyed puss, he was innocence itself. No one would suspect him for a second-story man. At our neighborhood branch of the New York Public Library, Johnny would purloin from the bookshelf the “A” volume, and toss it out the window. Jimmy and I, with our coats spread à la fireman’s safety net, would catch the book. To avoid an excessive gap in the library’s shelf, volume “B” would be spirited from another branch in the same manner. And so on, through twenty-six branches in the city of New York.
My other pal was Abie Grossfeld, a superb athlete with a droll sense of humor. His cousin was the postman, a big leather sack on his shoulder, delivering the mail in our block. Abie introduced me to gymnastics, and I countered with ballet.1 I took him to the School of American Ballet to watch class and rehearsal. “That’s Balanchine,” I said, pointing, “he’s the greatest teacher of them all.” “Who’s that?” Abie pointed to the pianist. “Oh, that’s Stravinsky,” I said importantly. “Oh?” said Abie, “who’s Stravinsky?” “Oh, he’s great! Like Beethoven, only today!” “Who’s Beethoven?” Abie asked. I never knew if he was kidding or not.
Demonstrating with Abie the differences between ballet and gymnastics on TV, early 1950s (image credit 2.2)
My other street pals went on to careers as marines, firemen, police, priests, and crooks. One guy ran a big porno center on Forty-second Street. Several times in later years, I would be walking down Forty-second Street in Manhattan, when Mitch would pop out of his porno park and say, “Hey, Jock! Come on in,” and give me tokens. He had a fancy Mercedes parked in the no-parking zone in front of his emporium.
There were no artistic types on my block, only Herbie Khaury, a goofy teenager with long hair who played a ukulele. Soon, he transformed himself into a TV star, Tiny Tim, strumming the same ukulele.
At that time the neighborhood was still dotted with wood-framed single-family houses and old factories, most of the latter abandoned and decaying. The most dramatic was a run-down ice house on 169th Street and Audubon Avenue. Before refrigerators, people kept perishables in wooden iceboxes, their double walls filled with sawdust for insulation. For less than a dollar, you could purchase a block of ice from an ice truck, wrap it in burlap, lug it home, and install it in the icebox. To save money in the winter, you covered your butter and eggs and kept them on the windowsill.
The ice house had flourished some decades before. Now, mostly ruins, it was our haunted house, and Jimmy and I loved it. Five stories high, it loomed in dark brown wood and concrete, its windows black pigeonhole tunnels that stared out, unblinking. Gaping holes pockmarked its sides. The lower-story windows were boarded up, but we would pry one open and crawl in. The roof leaked. Rain and snow were gradually dissolving the place and the air was permeated with the moldy, pungent smell of rot, wet sawdust, and ammonia. The cavernous spaces, lit by us with candles and flashlights, would become our playground. It was deserted, except for a creepy guy who would sometimes shamble out of the shadows. He dragged his legs and couldn’t move