Rand Unwrapped (16 page)

A game of guns also had a social aspect to it. All the kids in the neighborhood both boys and girls played and there were no exclusions. The actual make up and gender of the children that played the game depended on who was outside playing and who wanted to be part of the game. Someone would say, “Hey, you wanna play guns?” If there was agreement, the game was on. Everyone had a chance to play even if they didn't have a toy gun. As I said, a stick or folded hand would work just as well. Just like the characters in
The New Generation
, the neighborhood kids got to know one another through the adventures they shared playing guns. There was a core group of us that hung out together more than others. This was probably because our houses, in Franklin Square, Long Island, shared one block between First and Second Avenue. When I think of it now, this block was probably not the safest place for a young child to play. It was near a very busy street called Franklin Avenue. But it also had several vacant lots and a back area of a nightclub called
Casa Seville
that faced Franklin Avenue. The
Casa Seville
was sort of a mob hang out which was really busy at night and on the weekends. However, during the daytime, it was pretty quiet. But there still were all sorts of shady characters in shiny suits hanging around the front entrance. We sometimes would play in back of it, which was a service area for the kitchen and bar. But mostly we used the empty lots as our battlefields. Our favorite was a run down piece of property, we called
the old man's lot.
It was just around the corner from my house and was bordered by an old rusty fence and grape vine. In one corner of it there was a small abandoned bungalow that had been boarded up and forgotten by time. We all believed that an “old man” lived in the bungalow at one time and then died. So, we called it
the old man's lot.
The grape vines were an added feature when grapes were in season. The green grapes were a great source of ammo to throw at one another. Also, when the grapes ripened, they made a nice stain on your clothes if one hit you. We liked it because it looked just like you were shot. Our parents hated it, because the grape juice stains were almost impossible to get off of your clothes. However, the
Casa Seville
offered more variety. We often played in the service area behind the kitchen and bar where there was a labyrinth of walls, tunnels and stacks of wooden boxes. We also liked it because we often found lots of interesting things that one might find in the back of a nightclub including half full bottles of scotch whiskey, stacks of Playboy magazines and one time a box of .22 caliber bullets. However, the best thing that we ever found there was on a New Years Day afternoon. We were playing in the snow in back of the club and there in a frozen metal bucket was an unopened solid gold bottle of champagne! We promptly popped it open and drank it. I don't remember much else about that day. In addition to the vacant lots, there was what seemed to be an endless number of rolling lawns and backyards that we ran through. There were also lots of trees and bushes to hide behind and an occasional barking dog that would give away our hiding place. This was our immediate universe.

While the players in any game of guns could come from anywhere in the neighborhood at large, there were the regulars. The first was a kid name Donnie short for Dominic. Remember, this was an Italian neighborhood so most of the kids no matter where they lived, all had the same names Joey, Donny, Frankie, Tony, Guido like that.

Donnie was a lot like Lunk. He was larger than the rest of us but didn't really take his
space as a leader. He was a follower who always went along with whatever we wanted to do. The only thing that would get him to break ranks was food. He was always hungry. Sound familiar? We'd be out there playing and then in the distance he'd hear the ringing bells of the Good Humor ice cream truck and before we knew he was gone. I don't know how he heard it when it was so far away, it was almost like he had ESP, but he would take off, get his parents to give him money and be back in enough time to catch the truck as it turned the corner. That was Donnie but our neighborhood group also had some girls in it and there was one (believe it or not) named Annie.

Annie was a six-year old girl and when you're a boy about eight years old that's a very big thing. Most girls, did not play with boys and if they did they were relegated to be the nurses, the teachers and the moms within a game of guns. Annie was different, and she like Annie Mint LaBelle was talkative and outgoing. Don't get me wrong, she was still a girl and played with girls most of the time. If there was any one of the girls that was a bit younger, that crossed the gender line, it was Annie. She played guns with us some of the time in a traditional way and then other times was part of the girl group of nurses. The sad part about Annie was that she moved away before we got to be better friends. If Annie broke the traditional mold of what a girl should be when you're in elementary school, Bobby Kulpepper (not his real name) broke the rules for the boys. Bobby was in the same grade as I was but for some reason was a lot taller than the rest of the boys in the class. I am not sure if he was from another country or not but he also dressed differently the rest of the kids. Now when you stick out from the rest and dress different, you're setting yourself up for bullies and the like. In Bobby's case, he might have been from Germany or Switzerland because his mom always made him come to school wearing a Bavarian outfit with suspenders and
lederhosen
. He would show up to school in the morning in longer shorts, suspenders with his socks pulled up really high. To make matters worse, his mom sent him to school wearing cologne prompting certain kids to call Bobby “Bobby PU.” You know “Pee Yew” like your holding your nose and saying something smells really bad. Bobby used to sing and dance at
show and tell,
so this poor kid was really on the hit list for all of the bullies in elementary school. They would always laugh and shoot spit balls at him when he sang musical theatre songs at
Show and Tell
. I really don't know why our teacher allowed them to do that. But they did.

One day in the playground, these bullies kept pushing Bobby Kulpepper around while saying he dressed and smelled like a girl. They kept pushing him until Bobby's back was up against the cyclone fence near the baseball diamond. At that very second, when there was nowhere else to go, Bobby Kulpepper pushed back. Once he did that, something happened inside of him. It was like all the abuse that was pent up inside of him made him snap. He proceeded to take on about four bullies and dispatched them all in short order. When it was all over, he just walked away without saying a word. The following day, for
Show and Tell
, Bobby sang a song from
The Sound of Music.
You know the one that goes, “Doe a deer a female deer…” except he sang it with a German accent. On that day, when Bobby finished his song, no one laughed. Everybody cheered because he had such a beautiful voice and no one ever called Bobby Kulpepper “Bobby PU” again. He was just Bobby just another one of the group of kids we played with. When I did
Robotech,
and saw Lance Lancer Belmont for the first time, it was Bobby Kulpepper all over again.

While our group had no official leader who told us where we were going and what we would do. There were older kids from the block that hung around with us and just by
their sheer size and age we let them call a lot of the shots. There was one pair of brothers named Ray and Joey that lived most of the time in a house on Second Avenue. I say most of the time, because they also had a place in Queens (that's a borough of New York City). They were a real pair of New York City street kids about three years older than we were. Ray was the older of the two and had a very cool green
Schwinn Hornet Cruiser
that was the fastest bike in the neighborhood. Joey also had a Schwinn cruiser. It was a
Red Panther
but he never was able to get the speed that his older brother had achieved. Ray had the fastest bike, was at least three years older than the rest of us and also came from Queens. So, when he was around, he called the shots. That meant that Ray could call the game of guns and decide whether or not it was cowboys and Indians or army. He could also choose when we were going to the pool or playing dodge ball. One thing I forgot to mention, because Ray was older he was larger than all of us except Donnie. This meant he was the toughest and could take any of us in a fight. But he never was a bully to any of us. He made the decisions and if we didn't want to follow him, we could go our own way without a problem. There was one little tricky little situation, if you were playing guns against Ray and you shot him, would he accept the hit? There was always this question in all of us as to whether he would ever allow one of us younger kids to shoot him “dead” in guns. I mean what if you shot him, “Bang!” “I shot you Ray, you're dead!” What if Ray said, “No, I don't wanna be dead.” What would you do then? I never shot Ray so I never got an answer. If we played guns with Ray, we just assumed he would always be the last one standing because none of us would ever shoot him dead. But on the other hand, Ray was always good to have around if you had a problem. He would always back you up. I remember asking him to come to the neighborhood pool with me when I had the problem with the three bullies. He was glad to do it and was there for me if anything came down. Ray was our Scott Bernard, he set the agenda and once he made up his mind, he would never change it. I remember playing softball with him once and it started to get dark. Ray didn't care and made us play all nine innings in the dark before he would call it quits. He was a driven kid with a vision that meant we didn't do very much hanging around when Ray was present. If Ray were there, he would come up with something and we would be off and running. I will always think of him riding on his Green Hornet with all of us following in tow. Now, I don't want you to think it was one happy universe because our neighborhood also had Invid like inhabitants. For us, this came in the form of
Drac
and his two friends
Lenny the Leach
and
Moose.

Drac
was a much older kid that lived over on Third Avenue. He was probably in High School or at least old enough to get his learner's permit to drive. So that made him pretty old. He lived over on Third Avenue which was an area we rarely played. It was just outside of the universe that we created for ourselves. I don't actually know what Drac's real name was. We just called him
Drac
because it was a short for
Count Dracula
the vampire. He looked He looked just like Christopher Lee, the British actor who played Count Dracula in all the horror films we saw on Saturday afternoons at the movies. He was extremely tall, at least to us, with slicked back hair back and wore a black leather jacket even when it was really hot in the summer. He had really large fangs that protruded outward from his mouth even when he wasn't smiling. You could spot him a block away walking down the street with his two sidekicks in tow. The smaller one was
Lenny the Leach
and the larger one was
Moose
who both did whatever Drac told them to
do.
Lenny the Leach
, who looked a lot like Joe Pesci in
Leathal Weapon IV
, got his nickname because he was truly up Drac's butt and would follow right behind him always muttering, “What we gonna do now Drac? What we gonna do now?” Drac would always snap back at him, “Shut the hell up will ya Lenny! and back off, you're breathin right down my neck!”
Moose
(we never really knew his real name either) looked like one of those stuffed animal heads that hunters would hang on the walls of their log cabins. He just looked forward with penetrating dark eyes and never spoke. He just did whatever
Drac
told him to do. One time
Drac
told him to hold a kid upside down to empty the change out his pockets.
Moose,
didn't say a work and just picked the kid up with one hand and held him upside down until all the loose change was on the floor beneath him. These three goons never came your way to wish you well. If they were walking toward you it was to do something bad to you. You either ran or hid in the bushes until they walked by. These goons were truly Invid annihilators looking for something to destroy if they didn't get their way. When we saw them walking down the street toward us, we simply headed in the opposite direction.
Drac
and his friends were simply too old and too big to mess with in conventional hand-to-hand combat. But, that didn't stop us from screwing with them once in a while. At one point, we resorted to a time tested method of long-range battle known as
shit on a stick. Shit on a stick
was simply what it describes. Usually a large (preferably moist) sample of dog or cat turd placed upon the top end of a medium size branch or bamboo. Once placed in such a manner, the stick could be pulled backward and then released at the appropriate moment; propelling the turd with amazing accuracy toward a stationary or moving target. The
shit on a stick
method of combat allowed us to hide ourselves, hit targets accurately from very far distance and quickly withdraw without being caught. Another advantage was that there was an endless supply of ammo turds available on nearby lawns and empty lots. When we saw
Drac
and his goons coming toward Second Avenue we would hide in the bushes until they were in range. As they crossed the street in front of us, we let them have it. By the time they knew what hit them we were gone. Like the Invid, Drac and his goons kept returning in new and different ways. However, each time they returned they were met by a small but determined group of freedom fighters armed only with sticks, toy guns, bikes and a few dog turds. This rag tag group saved Second Avenue for future generations.