Garage Lessons

Garage Lessons

The old man leaned an oak chair back against the front brick wall of the garage. He sat back in it and brought the morning newspaper up close to his face, bifocals slipping down toward the end of his thin nose. Sometimes he smoked a pipe, adding to the danger of the daily balancing act. There, on his precarious perch, the ritual unfolded in July’s morning sun. It seemed that peace was deservedly upon him. Suddenly, however, like kamikazees, we came screaming by him on our Schwinns, yelling “Old man Black sat on a tack,”, forcing his head up from the paper. Circling in the middle of the street, we made another suicide run past him, still screaming our “Old man Black” taunt and laughing the annoying, hysterical laugh that only twelve year old boys can summon.

Mr. Black, keeper of the neighborhood car storage garage, would push himself forward from the wall, the front legs of his chair would bounce off the sidewalk and the unfair footrace would be on. The slow-footed old man would run out into the street, chasing us away. Most of what he yelled was not understandable; just the “God damn kids” part of it. Had my Dad seen us taunting the poor old guy, his belt would have been torn off and it would be, as he called it, “tuneup time”. The other dangerous part of our stupid play was that Old man Black had a cane that he propped up against the wall while he read the paper. Occasionally, he would aim the cane at our bike spokes, trying to unseat us. A few times he had achieved limited success when my friend, Ritchie, or I spilled onto Connell Street’s hot blacktop but we were nimble enough to drag our bikes away, leap back on and later show off our scrapes to the guys on the corner as badges of honor. We had no idea of what the old man would do if he actually got his hands on us but the prospect was terrifying. Having that wrinkled, long-nosed face and pipe-yellowed teeth up close would be horrible, for sure. Our old apartment house that was immediately adjacent to the garage so I could only hope for some neighborly consideration if worse ever came to worst.

Those were my earliest memories of the run-down storage garage next door to us and its keeper. The building was about half the size of a football field and sat on a hill overlooking homes below on Franklin Street. In those days, everything was measured in relation to a football field. It housed nearly 50 cars and was covered by a tar roof. Thirty five years before, the place had been a community theatre, the Connell Street Music Hall, so the ceiling throughout was an ornate sheet metal with a pattern that could still be seen through decades of rust and dust. Rumor had it that the heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey, and his girlfriend, Estelle Taylor frequented the theatre when he courted her. Taylor, who lived across the street in the early 1920’s, went on in 1922 to achieve Hollywood success as Miriam in Cecille B. DeMille’s The Ten Commendments.

The garage was divided into two separate areas that were connected by a drive-through. At $6.00 a month to rent a covered space, many Connell Street residents and those from the adjoining neighborhood took advantage of the bargain. All of this became important to me one day when my Dad announced, “I’m gonna be the new garage keeper, Jim. Mr. Black died last week and the owner, Mr. Goldberg, has asked me to take it over. It’s a way for us to make a little more money.” I was too young to understand Dad’s exact meaning, which was “Hey kid, you’re going to manage a car storage garage. Got it?”

Next to the pavement, there was an office that was about ten by ten feet square. In the evening, I would man the desk next to a large, plate glass window. Dad was usually working the 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M. shift at a nearby firehouse. Those taking or parking their cars and locals passing by would wave at me as I labored over my homework . Others, needing gas from our pumps, would blow their horns on their way out in the evening and I would run to man the hose. On weekends, I would wash cars or trucks that had garage-rented space for spending cash. My first garage lesson came early on. Friends would drop in nearly every night to gab, laugh and tell lies. One night we decided to smoke some cigarettes, Luckies,as I recall, to enhance the tale-telling. When our session broke up, we forgot to empty the ash trays. My dad came home from work in the morning and discovered a still smoky office. Later that day he confronted me, as good fathers have done down through the ages.

“I found your ash trays and butts this morning,” he snapped at me after school. “I’ve given this some thought today and, in fairness, I’ve concluded that you should be able to smoke….if you can.” Sometimes dad was very fair…and creative as well. Other times, that was not so. I listened carefully, as he went on, to divine which kind of day it would be.

“I think you should prove to me that you really are a smoker before I allow it in the office again. So, what do you say, are you ready to prove yourself?” I knew right then that he was up to no good but accepted the challenge anyway, being the tow-headed smartass that I was.

“Yeah, Dad, I think I can do that. When do I start?” Dad, who smoked only Old Gold cigarettes himself, reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar, still wrapped in plastic. He handed it to me, saying “Take this down to the garage and start smoking it for me. And remember, please, real smokers inhale so I want you to inhale. This was all pre-Bill Clinton. Understand?” “Oh yeah, I totally understand what this is all about,” I thought to myself. I was very young but not stupid.

I left our apartment, sentencing order in hand, and went down and opened the garage office. Within minutes, I had “lit up” the putrid stogie. I inhaled every drag on the dreaded stump as the office filled with smoke. In no time at all I was sick all over the pavement outside. My dear dad, of course, was just exiting our apartment house when the retching began. He stood at a safe distance until my misery was complete and then approached without emotion, saying “I don’t think that you’re a real smoker, Jim. Why don’t you throw that damn thing away and wash off the sidewalk now?” Dad went on to retrieve our ugly, brown Buick from the garage and drove away. I did what sons do in these circumstances; I cursed in the direction of his exhaust.

From that day ‘til now, I have never been able to inhale a cigarette, pipe or cigar. I think of it as my first “garage lesson”, one well-earned. And there were others.

Ladies who lived on Franklin Street in two story, semi-detached homes, had bedrooms that backed up to the rear of the garage building. When my friends and I decided to move our evening gatherings from the office to the back of the building, where it was poorly lighted, new lessons emerged; lessons in female behavior in front of mirrors. Quite by accident one night, I swear it, we were all trying to outdo each other, bragging about our baseball playing. A light went on in a nearby house. With no warning at all, a young woman entered the room and began removing her dress. All the baseball talk ended abruptly. We five young boys became her silent audience as she removed pins and ribbons in her hair until it fell down lightly against her tanned back. Swaying from side to side as she removed her underwear, she danced for the mirror…and for us. It was classic invasion of privacy, for certain, but we were too young to be sued for it. She was likely envisioning a real audience as she danced but, fact is, she would never have found a more appreciative group than the sweating, panting and grunting group in the garage that night! When she turned her light off, we all hurried toward the garage exit and the seeming boredom of the street.

There were rafters throughout the old garage too. We could enter from the tarred rooftop and sit up on those rafters in several areas. One of them was above an old, infrequently-used bathroom down in the garage. At one time it had probably been the restroom for the Music Hall. Now it was our “clubhouse”; a place where we would hang pictures of Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Ava Gardner and, of course, our sports heroes. One day, my buddy Jim O’Donnell and I were sitting up in the rafters enjoying our own little private world. Four sneakers dangled down from our perch and the view was straight on down to the toilet, about twenty feet below. Ms. Armstrong, my elementary school principal who kept her car in the garage, opened the bathroom door and entered. I recognized her immediately and began shushing Jim with my finger up to my frozen lips. As the elderly lady squatted and peed immediately below us, I imagined our fate if she were to simply look upward and see us peering down. It was all I could do to keep from falling down on her as our bodies fidgeted and wretched with stifled laughter. Not until she had left the stall and the garage were we able to begin slapping each other and giggling out loud. I was never again able to listen to Ms.Armstrong’s announcements or speeches in the Williams School auditorium without that giggle returning.

Sometimes places seem to promote circumstances; things that just could not happen somewhere else. The old garage was one of those places. As I grew, there were many other crazy experiences there like the time when I was playing sex games with “Hot Helen” in the back of a closed linen delivery truck and the spare tire, balanced against the wall, fell down on us. The time when one of my car washing friends drove one of the cars right on through the garage doors and out into the street, fortunately killing no one. Occasionally, we would find old bottles of wine in the office attic and drink them until we were simple.

It was all part of the richness of growing up poor in the city. My own kids, Jason and Lauren, were raised in the suburbs and missed the flavor of it all. And they didn’t have a garage either. I have mixed feelings today, considering the nature of my garage lessons, about whether that was a bad or a good thing.

Story ID:	3195
Written by:	jim rambo (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Family History
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Wilmington Delaware U.S.A.
Year:	1953
Person:	The City Kid (Me)