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By Root 709 0

the South Bronx from the Hunts Point Bay, bringing with it a peculiar garbage-smell of spring. The doors of the firehouse are open, and standing about in the front of our quarters we watch a small pack of boys ride their bicycles aimlessly up and down Home Street, stopping occasionally in front of Pete’s Bodega to talk with a group of girls gathered there. The bicycle rims shine in the twilight, and foxtails hang casually from rear fenders. I count the circling boys and their bicycles. There are eight in the pack, dungareed and polo-shirted, healthy black or tan faces smiling, satisfied and happy on the first warm night of the year. Five of them ride sleek English racers, their backs arched over as they control the low half-moon handle bars, and the click-clicking sounds of sprockets are heard intermittently through the din of traffic as they coast down the street. The other three ride the heavier-type American bike—like the formidable Schwinn I dreamed about as a boy, but never owned. How hard their fathers must have worked to buy these bicycles, and how their mothers must have saved, for there is never an excess of money for people who live on Home Street.

As I watch the boys ride down the darkening street, I remember begging Bobby Walsh for a ride on his bicycle. “Cmon Bob, just a little ride, down to Jasper’s candy store and back. Cmon Bob.” How different this poverty of today is from the poverty of my childhood. Kids ride new, gleaming, expensive bicycles, mothers watch television between telephone calls, and fathers drive automobiles. Yet, the poverty is just as real, just as hurting, and the ignominy of being without money—being poor in a country where there is gold mixed with the street’s concrete—is as obvious to the people of Home Street as it was to me on East Fifty-sixth Street twenty years ago.

I was twelve years old when our first television set was given to us. My uncle was working for the railroad, and his track boss bought a new set. He gave the old one to my uncle, and my uncle gave it to us. It had a ten inch screen encased in a wooden cabinet. I don’t remember the cabinet style, or the shape of the control knobs, just that the reception was never very clear. My uncle delivered the set on a summer weekend, and I remember that my mother worried about how she would hide it from the welfare investigator. Television sets weren’t allowed then, nor were telephones. I never understood that. Why should we hide a television set that was given to us? It was the rules. If one welfare family had a television set, even if it were given to them, then everybody on the dole would expect one. The set was covered with an old bedspread. It sat in the corner of our living room looking like a square box covered with an old bedspread. My mother would occasionally put a vase on top of it to make it appear that it had a purpose, but it still looked like a square box covered with an old bedspread. In the afternoon, the bedspread could be removed, because the welfare investigator only visited in the mornings. Either the afternoons were his own, or he spent the time in his office writing reports about suspicious-looking objects covered with old bedspreads. I don’t know. But, that was during the McCarthy era, and everyone and everything was suspect.

One moming the investigator came. I was sitting at the kitchen table, which my mother had covered with the left-over linoleum from the kitchen floor. I was eating cereal, and my older brother was across the room from me, bathing in the kitchen tub. My mother was sitting in the living room reading a magazine—she always read a lot—when the knock on the kitchen door came. My brother left his bath quickly, because you don’t lie lazily and relax when the bathtub is in the kitchen, and my mother adjusted the television bedspread before going to answer the door. She put her hand on the painted doorknob, then paused for a moment as if she remembered something. She turned, and looked briefly into the medicine-cabinet mirror hanging above the kitchen sink, turning her head from side to side