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CHILDHOOD STORIES

Posted by Erik Frey Wed, 07 Nov 2001 07:06:00 GMT

i was a curious child. i lived in fantasy world half the time, and the other half i lived in a real fantasy world, the noisy streets of the upper west side manhattan, NYC.

it was almost like some kind of half-autism… the part of me that acknowledges and appreciates the importance of the world around me only kicked in when i was maybe 11 or 12 years old. until then, i framed and filled the boring parts of the world with my imagination, and i think occasionally i’d forget the boundary between where my imagination ended and where the real world began.

i never went home after school, but instead my parents paid this strange lady to take care of me. she had a kid of her own, i don’t even remember the kid’s name or what he looks like now… which is odd. i have all these visual memories but in each of them there’s pretty much a grey spot in place of him.

after watching back to the future the night before, i convinced this kid that i’d read scientific research stating that if you spun batteries at 88 miles per hour they would flash and disappear back into time. we pulled batteries out of everything we could find and spun them as quickly as we could. when that didn’t work, we taped batteries to his plastic toys… cars, boats, action heros, even this great big plastic apache helicopter he had. we then carried all these time-machine equipped toys to the edge of his fifth floor apartment window, propped the window open…

...these toys would arc so gracefully through the air, and in my head i could see them spinning faster and faster, until they spun into a blur, flashed hot white, and disappeared mid-air. instead, i had to resolve this with what my eyes were telling me – that there were lots of toy parts strewn across the sidewalk, with baffled pedestrians looking up as they passed. as we picked up his prized apache helicopter, i told the kid “don’t worry, this one is sure to work… it’s aerodynamic”. the word seemed to impress some kind of authority, he nodded, and we heaved the helicopter out the window…

~
the subway exit to 108th street was a human zoo. people there generally had to muscle and shove their way up to the ticket counter, and then run hurriedly to the right platform just in time to catch the next train. my mom was holding tightly onto my hand as she carved a path for us towards the steps of the exit. as we were climbing the steps, something caught my attention, and i slipped out of my mom’s grip.

i ran up to a man standing halfway up the stairs. he was old, very old. his face was covered in thick sag lines, his fingers were wrapped up in grimy blackened athletic tape. he was wearing a grey woolen coat a few sizes too large for him, and he smelled funny. his hand was outstretched, and his fingers gnarled into the shape of a cup. i stood up onto my tippy toes to see what was in his hand and was suprised to find a few quarters, nickels, and a penny.

i thought about it for a moment… reached up… and snatched the coins from his hand.