PS 104

         It all started on Facebook.

          My wife was teasing me one day that I had a Facebook page without a face and nothing on my “wall” (she had picked up the lingo from my daughters and was showing off) and so we sat down that day and dusted off my page, with nothing on it except the outline of my face, and we typed in some names to see if we could drum up some friends for me.

          Nobody came up—my crowd was way pre-Facebook.

          And then I took one more stab and typed in the name from the distant past that still resonated—a crush I had in grammar school at PS 104. It was one of those star-crossed romances that lasted until graduation and then faded into the mist of memories—until I typed in the name now—and suddenly the name came up! It was Virginia—the same Virginia—it was Ginny herself! With the flaming-red hair! And it was flaming-red still! And she was now on Facebook!

           I nervously typed out a message: Are you the girl from PS 104? (I knew very well she was, but would she remember me? Or care to?)

          Yep, came the reply. You the guy who wanted to be a lawyer?

          (Who me? That’s how distant the memory was.)

          And then she introduced me through Facebook to Jane, the girl who was everybody’s friend at 104. And who now lived in Long Island—and still remembered my birthday! And everybody’s birthday! And the names of all the kids in the class photo! She practically tagged them all!

          Helen was on Facebook, too, she now lived in Connecticut and she got into the spirit and posted the class photo after scanning it. She was one of the smart girls in class who sat near the teacher, which means she didn’t remember me much—I sat in the back row among the hooligans. (Near Steve with the blond mullet and striped sailor pants and white Converse sneakers who got bored and played Wipe Out on his desk all the time and laughed a horse laugh, and was a nice kid.)

          Jane was also in touch with the formidable twins who ruled the school and were the “big men” in our world at PS 104: Randy and Robby. Randy was in my class and had a high voice and called me Mick. He taught me much and was a buddy and I felt like a big man, too, when I walked in the halls with Randy. Robby was in another class and was one of the cool kids in school. He had this swipe of hair that fell across his eyes and he would toss back with a jerk of his head that made him very cool and I remember having this long conversation with him once in the gym about UFOs. “They’re all over, Mick,” he said (with a toss and swipe of his hair). “They probably landed in Brooklyn already.” And I didn’t know if he was kidding or he was for real—with Robby you never knew. “Yeah, sure, Robby,” I said to be on the safe side.

          Jane also knew about Chris, who sat in the class near the window and wore Hush Puppies and had freckles on his nose and buck teeth that made him look like one of those Norman Rockwell kids running away from the swimming hole; she said he had made a career in the Coast Guard.

          And also on Facebook was Arlette (amazing that Facebook), another of the smart girls, who got into writing, too, and wrote me a snappy message back (Were you one of the tall kids? Did you have dark hair?) and who was now living in California and was a doting mom.

          And there was Joyce, yet another of the smart girls, who looked just the same in her profile picture, and wanted to have a reunion.

          And Lesley, who was now a teacher, and in those days had a mane of hair and wore sweaters a lot that seemed to be fuzzy in the winter and always form-fitting (at least in my imagination).

          And there was Greg, a fellow Greek, who lived in California now and raced cars and rode motorcycles, but in those days was an altar boy with me, and came to my house for lunch on Parrot Place, and we played touch football together outside Tubby’s house off Fourth Avenue on the street in the shadow of the school. Alfred and Tubby usually came together (Alfred small and nervous but talking with a surprisingly deep voice, and Tubby, or Robert, who barely squeezed into his pants and had a rolling walk—hence, the name).

          Alfred walked on the balls of his feet, and had freckles, and rubbed his hands together and talked from the side of his mouth. I used to go his house after school and race his slot cars. He lived in a huge fortress of an apartment building where the elevator doors slammed shut like bank vaults. His brother called me the kid with the ears, because my ears stuck out then and were the bane of my childhood existence.

          I was playing football with Greg and Alfred and Tubby one day on Fourth Avenue when we saw helicopters flying overhead and cop cars and black cars racing up and down the avenue and we wondered what was up —until we saw the presidential limo with the little flags snapping on the hood as it glided down the avenue and made the left turn at the White Castle on 92^nd Street and we saw Lyndon Johnson himself, the president of the United States, hunkered down by the window and crushed by the Secret Service but still waving his politician’s wave.

          “Hey, wasn’t that—?” said Tubby, doing his patented double-take.

          “Some guy who wants to blow all the lights,” said Alfred from the side of his mouth, rubbing his hands together.

          “Look at the guns!” said Greg, pointing to the sharpshooters on all the roofs.

          “Don’t shoot me—holy cow, Batman!” Tubby shouted (Yes, Batman was big on TV around then).

          So we jumped Tubby and held him down for the sharpshooters, but he squealed and ran away to the safety of his backyard with the genteel white fence that seemed so out of place for a cutup like Tubby and so out of place for our little neck of Brooklyn.

           Miss McShane was my homeroom teacher in both 7^th and 8^th grades, with her Prince Valiant haircut, blouses with ivory brooches, long maroon skirt and seamed stockings, and the wristwatch with the plain black band. She had wonderful cold blue eyes that stared you down when you were bad, and sparkled when you amused her, and she could be amused and then had a little girl laugh. I brought in some pebbles one day that I had collected on the beach in Greece and showed them around and I was very serious and she was amused that I was very serious. She gave us an assignment to do a book report in the coming weeks and I read a bio on Peter the Great that night and brought her the report the next day and she was amused. “You read the book already?” she said.

          “Sure,” I said.

          “Well…” she said, amused again, and she tilted her head at me with new appreciation, and suddenly I realized, maybe I had found my calling. I could be a reader! I could read a biography of Peter the Great in one night! Maybe I should write, too, because much as I wanted to, I was nothing like the artist Bobby was. Bobby sat in front of me in class with a happy smile on his face and a sketchpad on his desk and he sketched beautiful dragsters and racing cars mostly freehand and he always got them just right. He was one of the base kids: the kids who came from nearby Fort Hamilton and stayed a couple of years at school before their parents were transferred somewhere else again. I went to his house once and it was draped in the family’s artwork (they were all talented)—but it was only temporary housing and I could imagine the family packing up everything when they had to move away and going to yet another nondescript sun-baked base to hang up their artwork in yet another nondescript base housing apartment.

          One day Bobby came over to my family’s restaurant to eat dinner (alone, like a little man) and he brought his sketchpad with him, of course, and he did a sketch of the dishwasher that was uncanny. And that’s when I gave up my dream of drawing the rooster in the back of TV Guide and wowing them at the Famous Artists School and I decided to become a writer.

          Only English was my second language. We spoke mostly Greek at home, and all my older relatives spoke Greek, and all my young cousins spoke Greek or English with an accent, and I wondered if what I said I pronounced right half the time.

          And I wasn’t much of an American sportsman, either. I stunk pretty much in all “American” sports: what good was a mitt for, anyway? And I couldn’t throw a spiral in football despite patient coaching (“Mick, you gotta put your fingers on the seams!” said Randy), and I was only marginal in basketball: I did set a record once for the most consecutive free throws after school. But forget about dodgeball in the gym–that ultimate test of schoolboy manhood—I was the kid in the back row doing a lot of running and yelling and hoping fervently that the ball never got to me through all those bodies.

          But, believe it or not, it was through athletics (sort of) that I finally found my place.

          She was the girl with the red hair who stood in the back row of the volleyball game we played after school. She was almost as tall as me. She wore very clean white sneakers and had showgirl legs and very nimble feet. She was a star at the school—the girl who played all sports and was friends with boys and girls—and she had freckles and flashing blue eyes: she was an All-American beauty.

          And I remember slamming the volleyball at her once in the back row during a game and seeing how she got flustered and blushed and snapped those flashing blue eyes at me reproachfully. I felt bad. But I did it again.

          And then I would see her in the hallway between classes, like a proper princess surrounded by her retinue of friends while hugging her books to her white blouse during Assembly days, and glancing at me, too, with her flashing blue eyes, that were sometimes soft now, while she whispered to her friends (about me?) through her coral-white teeth.

          I couldn’t wait for volleyball now after school. For once I was a champ. Especially when one of the girls showed me the notebook of the red-haired girl and it had my nickname scrawled all over it with a ballpoint.

          Me? Really? The Greek kid with the ears who couldn’t play sports? Who wore that funny jacket to school that nobody else wore? The All-American girl with the clean white sneakers who threw a softball better than me, and talked English in a whisper through pouting lips, and had flashing blue eyes that she flashed at me through the glorious mane of all that red hair—she actually liked me?

          It was my validation. I had arrived at PS 104. The princess and me even went to the White Castle and had fries and held hands.

          And now a lifetime later when Ginny with the red hair accepted my friend request on Facebook—and all the other friends joined in from the days at PS 104—Jane, Arlette, Helen, Joyce, Lesley, Greg—by the modern miracle of social networking we had all become “friends” again.

          (Miss McShane still lives in Brooklyn and retired in 2000 after 50 years of teaching at PS 104.)

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