Knots in My Yo-Yo String (8 page)

A few years later along came Lucky (so named because
after the lunchpail puppy, we were lucky to get another), part terrier, part unknown, a pretty mutt, mostly black, with white chest and paws and tip of tail. She was friendly, eager, barely disciplined, which is to say, she was like my little brother. They got along wonderfully.

Our dog Lucky.

I remember feet-fighting in my bed—lying on our backs and flailing our feet at each other. It was just harmless, boy horseplay, but sometimes I carried it far enough so that Bill wound up crying. I think now that in making him cry, I was fabricating an outlet for tender feelings toward my little brother that found no expression in the natural course of events.

I remember Bill getting into trouble more than I, both at home and in school. I secretly admired him for daring to just do things, regardless of consequences.

And I envied him his animation. Well before I entered junior high, I began cooling out. Gone were the days when I would serenade passersby from the gate in my yard or jingle-jangle off to school in my cowboy outfit. I was still friendly, but in a shyer, quieter way. Meanwhile Bill was just lighting up. He was everything I was not: bold and lively and funny. He was a natural mimic and a clown. He had, as the Lloyd Price song went, “Personality.”

And that’s about it, the extent of my kidhood relationship with my brother, Bill.

Or so I thought.

For something surprising happened, something nice, when I told him I was working on my autobiography. I invited him to jot down any recollections of me that he might have, in case I missed any. Several weeks later he handed me a list of memorable moments. I read it over. I was stunned: I hardly recalled any of them.

He remembers his own hurt feelings when I wouldn’t let him ride my tricycle.

He remembers, as a preschooler, how impressed he was that I could read cereal boxes.

He remembers how angry I got when he raided my closet for shirts and when he tangled the strings of my Howdy Doody puppet.

He remembers fearing for me when Raymond Chillano beaned me with a pitch during a Knee-Hi baseball game. And when the same Raymond Chillano, knowing I could not swim, tipped me in my street clothes into the deep end of the pool at the Valley Forge Swim Club. (Raymond was not always so hard on me. In fact, he was one of my best friends.)

He remembers an episode which, at the time, he considered positively historic. I was in the fifth grade at Hartranft Elementary. Bill was in first. Normally we walked the three blocks home for lunch. But on this particular day our mother had to be somewhere else, so she gave me money and told me to take my brother somewhere to eat. We met at noon. We went to a luncheonette a block away. We ordered our lunch, and for a little while Billy Spinelli felt as big as anyone in that place. He was having lunch in a restaurant, not a parent or teacher in sight, off into the world with his big brother. On the way back to school we were chased by bees.

Bill remembers as clearly as I the dirt path by the railroad tracks. He especially remembers one day when I propped him on the bar of my Roadmaster and gave him a lift from the dead end to the park. He remembers feeling the carnival-ride thrill of it. He remembers feeling proud and special. Most of all he remembers feeling safe, his brother’s breath in his ear, his brother’s arms joining the handlebars in a protective embrace.

Such are Bill’s recollections, and after all these years they bumped me over to a new point of view. I have always tended to see our relationship from a single perspective, from my own eyes; that is, Bill as my little brother. Now I see it from a second perspective: myself as his big brother.

I have decided that I like Bill’s memories of us better than my own. I especially like the one about the bike ride on the dirt path. I am picturing it now. I am feeling Bill’s feeling of safety, and I am feeling the big brother in myself. Maybe, if I keep picturing this memory of Bill’s and feeling it for a long-enough time, it will begin to fool me into thinking it is my own.

My brother (left) and me, clowning around at Christmas, 1957. The cigarettes are candy.

Some kids, when no playmates were around, didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have this problem. There was always exploring, and exploring was best done alone.

The Red Hills, the spear field, the tracks, the path, the dumps—all were sectors to be investigated time and again. But usually my route of exploration followed Norristown’s signature waterway: Stony Creek. My territory ranged from two grassy blanket-size islands near the Elm Street bridge to the far end of Elmwood Park, where the creek forked, one branch turning west into the vast farmland of the state hospital, the other meandering north on toward East Norriton Township.

In some places the going was easy, such as the stony flats under the Steriger Street bridge. In others the banks were so steep and near the water that I had to pull myself along with roots for handholds or hop the rocks midstream. The total length was a mile or more—to me it seemed Mississippian—and not an inch along the way, on either side, was unknown to the rubber soles of my black and white hightop Keds.

The zoo toward the far end of the park was, and still is, one of Norristown’s treasures, and I visited it often.
But it was near the western edge of the zoo, along the creek, where I came to know creatures unpenned. Squatting over the shallows, I studied schools of minnows in the finger-deep water. I pulled up a rock, and more often than not a crayfish—we called the tiny lobster look-alikes crawfish—scooted briefly into the sunlight and then under another rock. Water spiders skated over the glaring surface while angel-winged dragonflies and neon blue darning needles shimmered above.

Lurking below was something nasty—leeches. Bloodsuckers. They were everywhere, but unseen, unfelt. The only way to observe them was to leave a hand or foot in the water too long. That’s what I did once. It was one of the few times I found myself with others at the creek. I was wading—I don’t remember why—with my shoes and socks off and my dungarees rolled up, and when I got out, one of the other kids screeched and pointed. I looked down and saw them—black wormlike bloodsuckers clinging to the snow-white skin of my shins. Frantically I scraped them off. Now I was staring at a half-dozen driblets of blood, where the vampires had been dining. Were leeches poisonous? I didn’t know, but rattlesnakes were, and I knew from my cowboy days how to handle a snakebite.

I sat on the bank, hoisted a bare leg into the air, and announced, “Okay, you guys, you gotta get the poison out. Start sucking.” Suddenly everyone remembered
they had to be somewhere else that instant. As they clambered up the banks, I wiped off the blood with my shirt, picked up my socks and sneaks, and walked home as delicately as I could, afraid that if I came down too hard on my bloodless legs, they might crumple. I took a bath and survived the night.

And there were frogs—heard but almost never seen. Try as I might, I was never silent enough to sneak up on them. I knew them only by the watery plops that preceded me as I walked along the creek bank.

There were snakes. Mostly the common garter. But occasionally I chanced upon a truly special snake. Once, down near the Elm Street bridge, I found a large black one sunning on a flat rock. I pinned it behind the head with my stick, picked it up, and took it home. I put it in a two-handled tin picnic box and covered it with perforated cardboard. The next morning the snake was gone. I looked under everything in the house but couldn’t find it. Nor could I understand why my mother was so upset. She must have blabbed to the neighbors, because for the next several days panic held the 800 block in its grip. We never found it.

On another day I looked into the creek and saw a small brown and yellow water snake. It was like a jewel set among the sun diamonds sparkling in the water. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and at first I didn’t believe it. When I did, it was gone with the current. I raced downstream, concentrating on shadow
patches, for only there was it visible. I caught sight of it once for a moment, then lost it for good. I kept running the bank, searching, searching. The next day I returned to the spot. I stared so long and hard into the creek that once I imagined I saw it, but it was only the rippling, sun-dappled water itself. For the rest of the summer, and the next, as I visited my frogs and crawfish and minnows, I continued to search. And to this day I cannot walk along a stream without hoping for one more glimpse of the beautiful water snake.

And there was my favorite of all—salamanders. I loved the little critters, two inches of wriggle under a rock. Plain brown was the most common coloring. Sometimes I’d find one with an orange stripe. Yellow stripes were the rarest. I became so good at knowing where they lived that I seldom lifted a rock without finding one.

But I loved them wrongly. I wasn’t satisfied with simply finding and watching them. I wanted to collect them, as if they were marbles or baseball cards. I remember walking through the park one day with two fistfuls of them and more in my pockets. Once, I brought several home. I turned the black snake’s brief abode, the picnic box, into a terrarium: dirt, rocks, water. In went the salamanders. I forget what I fed them. Whatever it was, they didn’t eat. One day I found them dead, dried up like pieces of chewed rawhide. I buried them in the backyard, in the earth
they should never have been taken from, and kept the lifeless picnic-box terrarium as a reminder of a lesson learned.

When I got my Christmas bicycle, I roamed far beyond the creek. The whole town was now within reach. I rode without destination, with no intent but to look and look and look. To find myself on an unfamiliar street was all the thrill I needed.

I saw the rooftops of row houses stepping down the hills of the East End, like stairways for giants. I coasted the broader avenues of the more affluent North End, amazed to see unattached homes with backyards
and
side yards
and
front yards. I saw the riverbanks of the great Schuylkill—and learned to spell it. I saw the P&W high-speed trolley wobble across the river trestle from Bridgeport to nest at the terminal platform high above Swede Street. In the shadow of the P&W platform I saw the green newsstand with every magazine in the world (or so I thought) and the line of radio taxis, black boxy little Plymouths, one of which was driven by my neighbor, Mr. Seeton. I saw the domed courthouse and the high stone walls of the county prison and the steeple of my church, First Presbyterian, said to be one of the tallest in the land, poking a hole in the sky. I saw the impossibly long (one block!) city hall, where you could get yourself into or out of trouble at one end and buy penny candy at the other. I saw the sprawling
red-roofed building of the
Times Herald,
“Montgomery County’s newspaper since 1799.” I saw and smelled—again—the Adam Scheidt Brewery and the garlicky tang on East Main that came from Linfante’s and Lou’s, famous for the zep sandwich (salami, provolone, tomato, Bermuda onion, oil, with or without hot peppers), created in Norristown in 1938. I saw the bustling commercial districts of Main Street and West Marshall, with movie theaters—four of them—and restaurants and shops of all sorts and Chatlin’s department store, home of the famous fluoroscope.