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By Root 758 0

would rub me about being the idol of the under-sixteen set. And soon she told me that she hated living at home with all her brothers and sisters, and she hated school, because she couldn’t read very well, and she wanted a job so she could buy pretty clothes, but she wasn’t old enough to quit school yet. She had the same problems as millions of other adolescents in America. She was growing up, and trying to become a person instead of another mouth to feed, or another body on the living room pull-out couch, or another English-as-a-second-language voice in an English-as-a-first-language school. After two or three months—I can’t remember exactly—Tina stopped coming to the firehouse. I had forgotten her completely until she walked up Fox Street this morning. And I can’t help but think of all the other people who must have forgotten her somewhere along the road—the short road of three blocks from Home Street then to Fox Street now. I wonder if a school counselor ever talked to her, or a teacher? I remember that her mother was on welfare, and wonder if some social services official knows she exists, or existed. Wasn’t there even one person with some sense who talked to this shy, sensitive young girl? Someone to tell her that there are ways to unravel the emotional entanglements that human beings experience as they grow. Wasn’t there someone who knew at least something about guidance, direction, goals, self-motivation, self-esteem? But, maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe it has nothing to do with counseling or direction. Maybe it has to do, simply, with living in a tenement. How can you talk to a child of self-esteem when she is forced to wear her older sister’s outgrown clothes? How do you talk of self-motivation to a child who has never known the privacy of a room, or the quiet of a home? How do you talk of goals to a child who has never experienced a ten dollar pair of shoes, or to a child whose only trip in life has been from Puerto Rico to America?

I was fifteen when I unofficially quit high school. I just didn’t go. My mother was asked to bring me to the school guidance father. The priest told her, and me, that he got where he was by studying hard, and that I should do the same. I told him that I didn’t much care for being where he was, and I didn’t care either about being a failure in life, for that’s what he told me I would be if I refused to knuckle down. I tried to make him, and my mother, understand that it wasn’t that I was tired of being slapped by the Irish Christian Brothers, and that I didn’t mind being locked into a building for six hours a day, or about the reams of homework I was assigned daily, but that I had the prospect of this great job delivering flowers. I was going to be paid fifty dollars a week. Fifty a week. I could do whatever I wanted on fifty a week. But they didn’t understand, and my mother cried, and the priest told me that I was an insult to a good Catholic mother.

I was fifteen, and my pockets were empty. The country was enjoying the prosperity of the fifties, but I was still wearing six dollar shoes. With forty-two dollars take-home a week I could buy a pair of London Character wing tips. But nobody understood that I was wasting time in school. Time was fleeting irretrievably by in a classroom, when I could be earning money to save for a new one-button powder blue suit. Man, would I make a hit at the Police Athletic League dances with a powder blue suit, a pink shirt backgrounding a black knitted tie, and London Character wing tips. And shekels in my pocket to take a girl for a pizza after the dance.

I got the job in a Second Avenue florist shop, and I told the people I wanted to impress that I was studying to be a botanist. I walked the streets of Sutton Place, in and out of buildings that housed the richest people in the country, like I belonged there. It was only a matter of time before I would stand camel-haired in the lobby waiting for the starch-collared doorman to hail me a cab. And I would forget the dim, concrete floored, brown-bricked corridors of the service entrance.

The forty-two