MAJAYKO
Does God cast the dice when he assigns you a life?
The Camp Boatyard was a grim place. Tired, greasy, water logged.
There was an old, rectangular, flat-roofed office shack, sheathed in near colorless, imitation yellow brick. It was inhabited by Al Barnes, also tired, greasy and water logged. A cigar permanently stuck, bung-like in his mouth. Always the chewed-off remains of a cigar, in that dental disaster area.
If Al stood still, he became invisible, blending his drab, greasy-gray and sun-browned appearance into the backdrop of rusted rail tracks and blackened greased timbers of the side-tracking system.
Boats were hauled from the water on a trolley, pulled by a winch, driving a rough-hewn bull gear made out of slabs of welded steel. The boats were nudged sideways, off the trolley and onto the greased timbers, slipping and sliding, in a slow dance, until positioned where Al so desired.
The yard was a relic and most of the boats therein arrived to die on poor Al. Dead boats did not pay their bills and the owners were difficult to find. Al was dying slowly, along with his boatyard. But enough of old, cheerless Al. The yard itself was a fun place for kids, if you knew how to handle it.
Set on a stubby peninsula, holding thirty or so boats, the property was surrounded by a high, board fence painted pale yellow. A yard hand, who answered to the name Slopjob, had painted a weeping, warning sign, on the fence: STAY WAY DENGER!
Did he mean DANGER? Or was there some repulsive fellow named Denger? A question without an answer. Life is full of them.
The yard fence rested upon heavy, granite pieces that appeared to be rejected tomb stones. Some of the stones displayed parts of prayers and cherubs engraved into their polished but broken faces. Sort of birth defects that could not wear off.
My best friend known only as Majayko had taken up occupancy inside one of the boat hulks. It had once been a 40’ long cabin cruiser, probably back in the twenties or thirties. It had lost its youth or misspent it. The bilges smelled like dried out shit from the remains of degraded diesel fuel that permeated the old wood. But the cabin roof was still good and it offered complete concealment. A dark, dinge of space free from the probing eyes of adults and the rules of civilization. A kind of fort you could huddle in and feel a sense of excitement, hiding in plain site, in Al Barnes’ boat yard.
But you had to be quiet, stealthy. Al Barnes was not stone deaf nor did he lack an olfactory system. And he had a standing order against all neighborhood kids. Trespassers were under threat of experiencing a “hop up the ass.” I envisioned that to mean he would run, skip, hop and kick his greasy work boot deep into your anal cavity, if he caught you. Was that God’s mission-plan for old Al?
I was about ten or eleven when Majayko invited me to visit his purloined boat. He had in his possession a stolen pack of White Owl cigars and wanted to know if I’d like to smoke one. I had smoked before, a tiny corncob pipe I bought in Harris’s Stationary for a quarter. For tobacco, I raided ash trays thinking no one would notice that the cigarette butts had been stripped of tobacco and the paper covering rolled into little balls. I left the evidence in the ashtrays. I must’ve thought my parents were blind. Anyway, the pipe thing wasn’t too bad. But a cigar was a horse of a different color.
Majayko cautioned me not to inhale. One did not inhale a cigar. So I lit up and lay back against the peeling paint of the boat’s bilge planks, enjoying a moment of gratifying adult activity. The smoke was hot and acidy. It bit at the roof of my mouth, but I carried on, mimicking Majayko who showed a certain flare for cigars, savoring the smoke, studying the burning tip, looking at me with his tiny blueberry eyes, gauging my reaction. A connoisseur coaching a novice.
At first, things went fine, but then the cigar began pummeling my insides. My head began to spin, and I could feel my face turning green. That seems an odd thing to say, but I was sure I was glowing dull green. All my thoughts had a green dinge. The fog of smoke within the cavernous hull resembled pickle juice. It was a short distance to the empty engine compartment where I puked up the chicken dinner my mom spent hours preparing. A waste of good stuffing and gravy.
Majayko seemed to have been anticipating this reaction, as if he’d seen it happen before, to cigar neophytes. I had wondered about his sly, little smile that he directed at me, after each puff. When it finally happened, he burst into obscene laughter, as if he’d caught me in a sexual act.
Suddenly, as things of this nature occur, the hatch above us opened and the grisly face of Al Barnes appeared. Just as suddenly, his greasy boots appeared followed by his body. Sick or not, I burned rubber for the forward hatch, with visions of that work blucher stuck permanently, in my ass. How would I wipe myself?
The forward hatch did not have a cover. I grabbed the framework and boosted my body up and out, ran to the bow and lowered myself onto the rejected tombstones. Then over the Denger fence and a short drop into the swamp grasses, and I was gone. My heavy breathing flushing out the smoke and quelling my contaminated stomach. I didn’t wait for Majayko, despite his cries that I should do so. One did not wait for Majayko after he had gotten one into a jam involving bigger and stronger people, as often happened.
PART 2
Even so, when I was with Majayco on an adventure, I felt free from the silent, pulsing anxiety that permeated my home, wherein a coffee mug might suddenly become a missile from Mom to Dad. Majayko was a breath of fresh air and a boost to anyone’s adrenal gland.
Majayko was the product of the New York Foundling Home, a Catholic run orphanage. He had been given over to the orphanage shortly after birth due to his having a peculiar and tragic birth mark. Like the broken and mutilated granite tomb stone faces, his birth mark was dead center of his face. A wine-stain blotch that took in his nose, his mouth and the major part of both cheeks. As if that wasn’t enough, he also had a hare lip, a boxer’s smashed, off-center nose, wine mottled ears and those tiny blueberry eyes. He looked as though an animate thing, hidden in his mother’s birth canal, had beaten the shit out of him, for no good reason, as he was urged forcefully into the world.
None of this facial discoloration coordinated well with his close-cropped hay-yellow hair. His life was to be a short, wild, hedonistic train wreck.
One wonders at God’s sense of humor. Had the wine stain been on his back, it would’ve been a minor deformity, with little life-changing effect. If it had been on his ass, he might not have known he even had it. But smashed in the face with it was a black comedy. Years later, he underwent pro bono surgeries, to correct the lip and nose. The surgeries helped only a little. The red wine stain remained til his awful mental capitulation and premature, violent death, for which I felt some small degree of guilt
This facial trick of fate turned him into an unwanted child, an orphan who existed like mis-directed mail, landing and then ejecting from one foster care home to another, until he ended up in the bungalow behind ours, in The Camp, with Mr. and Mrs. O’Rourke, an elderly, childless couple.
Mrs. O’Rourke, possibly with the intent of slowing down Majayko’s frenetic activeness, filled his belly with enormous numbers of pancakes. Majayko often had twenty four Aunt Jemima pancakes for Saturday breakfast and bragged about it for the rest of the day. I wondered at the diameter of these pancakes but kept this to myself. Majayko had little enough to boast about.
He was always decently dressed and Mrs. O’Rourke made sure his short hair was gelled, parted and combed before he left the house. Their bungalow was also well cared for but Majayko was a burden to the O’Rourke’s. He was always involved in something unpleasant.
PART 3
Fights with other kids were common.
Playing with his erection, in sixth grade class, was another of his favorite pass-times and also a favorite memory of mine. Here’s how it went.
The blunt, obelisk tented his pleated, navy-blue school uniform pants, as he tightly wrapped a rubber band around it, providing observers with greater definition should any of us doubt what it was. It puzzled the inexperienced girls around him and drew knowing smiles from the more adventurous females. And, of course, it choked satisfying cackles from all the boys.
The ever watchful nun was reluctant to investigate this hedonism too closely. Sister Mary Scholastica, a nervous, flighty woman, wanted no part of an adolescent’s hard-on. She’d dilly-dally, waiting it out, calling out to Majayko to behave himself and when she felt it was safe, travel down the aisle between desks and, using a protective tissue, confiscate Majayko’s rubber band and drop it in the waste basket.
Aside from the hard-on activity, Majayko also liked to play with his milk. In two very distinct ways.
Way number one: in grammar school, we had a morning break during which we got a half pint carton of warm milk and a straw. Cookies were served to those who had the pennies to make the purchase.
Cookies didn’t interest Majayko. His passion was drawing milk through the straw, into his nose, where he had discovered a backdoor passageway, to his stomach, that I did not know existed. You can actually eat through your nose? Some of this nose-drawn milk he was able to swallow, some made him choke till his eyes teared, most just ran back out and dripped off his wine-stained chin.
It was delightful entertainment that caused me to spasm in convulsive laughter. Everyone loved it, excepting a few snooty girls and, of course, the nun. This was a problem she could easily confront and did, confiscating the milk container and the straw and ordering Majayko to sit with his hands folded, on the desk, where she could see them.
Majayko complied with great good humor, clowning along to the titters of his classmates, making a great deal out of being a mock-model student.
That was one milk event. The other was more peculiar. And disturbing. We were about to play baseball on the Camp Club ball field, a mud-brown field that periodically flooded with saltwater, from the nearby tidal creek, and upon which not a blade of grass ever grew.
I was late for the game and came running in from the outfield with my Duke Snider model 4-finger glove. I was relieved to see the game had not yet started. All the kids were huddled together. As I got closer, I saw they were huddled around Majayko who had his shirt off and appeared to be inspecting his chest. What he was doing was squeezing his breasts, causing a milky-gray fluid to exude from his nipple. After drying out one breast, he squeezed the other, mercilessly, to the delighted disgust of the viewing audience.
I was both entertained - and aghast. I never understood why boys had nipples. One of my theories was that maybe men could supply water, for a baby, to complement the mother supplying milk. But here was a boy that had achieved what I thought was the birthright of females. What gives? I was appalled. Disgusted. And worried. Was Majayko turning into a girl? Could that happen to me? My God. This was like a horror movie. I took my Duke Snider outfielder’s mitt and went home to brood.
I must say that Majayko was a most disturbing person. As well as being a personal friend of mine. I examined my own nipples but didn’t dare squeeze them. God forbid anything should flow out.
PART 4
I think it was the following winter. A Friday afternoon when it started to snow, tiny flakes that refused to melt and blew around into little piles. The piles were small drifts by the time school was out. The swamps were speckled white as we walked through their trails on our way home.
A Friday night snow storm. The timing was perfect. The snow was perfect in that it was sticking to the roads, causing traffic to move slower and cars to fishtail a bit in the turns.
Clearing snow, in the semi-rural northeast Bronx was not a sure thing in the fifties. A plow would show up now and then but, generally speaking, snow would accumulate and probably by midnight, there’d be no bus service to the neighborhood.
After dinner, I bundled up and put on my engineer boots, with the thick soles, and found Majayko and Red Bush, another godless Camp creature, and we made our way out of the Camp and up to 177th street. It was a long, straight, gently sloping stretch of road, with not much traffic, and low, undeveloped swampy areas, on both sides.
When we got to the place where the old cinder road appeared, at a right angle, I stopped and stared into the wilderness of that strange place that haunted my dreams. The cinder road disappeared in the swirling snow and looked as if it was inhabited by frantic ghosts. And maybe it was. My Dad’s cousin George went up there one night and was never seen again. It gave me a chill and briefly fired up that chronic anxiety, in the pit of my stomach. But the excitement of what we were about to do blotted out the brief belly fire.
“Car coming, Jamie. Get over here.” Majayko shouted me out of my fugue.
He and Red Bush were walking abreast along the centerline of 177th street. I joined them and the three of us pretty much blocked the road. The car honked and tried to swing around us. We ran to that side of the road, as the car now slowed. The window opened and out flew several epithets. But we got what we wanted, a slow car. This was the days when cars had manly bumpers forged of chromed steel.
We squatted down, grabbed hold of its rear bumper before the driver could accelerate away from us. Our boots skidded along the hard-packed snow. The car wheels spun out, throwing snow in our faces. We were off to the races. Better than anything at Coney Island. The car whipped us along at thirty miles an hour, the driver fishtailing, trying to throw us off. The cold air frosting our faces but couldn’t stop our laughter. When the car reached the entrance to the Camp, it made a hard left turn that flung us off like a bunch of grinning clowns and rolled us into the drifts building along the roadside. Hitching, we called it. The most fun winter sport ever invented.
We picked ourselves up, brushed off the snow and waited at the Camp entrance. We had seen a city bus go in and knew it had to turn round and come back out. You could get a great ride from a bus. The driver usually didn’t know you were there and the bus went all the way to the Westchester Square subway station. The only thing that stopped us from hanging on for the three miles was the threat of frost bitten fingers and toes.
The bus came round the curving Camp road and we plastered the windshield with snow balls. It stopped at the intersection and the driver opened a side window and called us “Camp bastards” giving us time to run to the rear end. We hitched up to its massive bumper, inhaled the warm diesel fumes. The engine’s super charger wailed and off we skidded, across 177th street, down the hill to Miles Avenue and up hill toward Tremont Avenue.
It was a great ride and we made it almost to Tremont Avenue when Majayko and Red Bush saw something and dropped off. I went a little further before I released my hold. I hadn’t seen what they saw. Their predatory eyes missed nothing. They’d found something more interesting. What, I wondered, could be more fun than this?
Free of the snarling bus, the quietness of the snowy night blanketed the swamps, the broad, empty expanse of Throgs Neck Boulevard - and the new, under construction, brick Ranieri houses. The start of the end of the rural Bronx.
I heard a snap, as if a piece of wood broke and caught a glimpse of a broad-hipped girl, in tight jeans and short leather jacket, as she slipped through a doorway and disappeared, into the dark interior, of one of the new, attached brick houses, still under construction.
She was followed by two teenage boys, bigger and older than us and considerably stronger. It seemed, in those days, that all teenage boys worked out with weights and bragged about how much they could bench press or curl. They turned at the doorway, glared at us, and waved a pinch-bar, as if ready to use it to bash our brains out, if we trespassed, on their dark activity.
“Holy shit, that girl, that’s Breslin,” said Red Bush, a giddy look on his freckled face.
“And Tony Marino, from the projects. I know him. He’ll let us watch,” said Majayko who appeared to have fore-knowledge of what was about to happen.
Let us watch what, I wondered.
Red Bush said, “You know that other fuck? That’s Squazzo.”
Progress halted, as they considered how dangerous the short, thick Squazzo might be.
Red Bush filled in the blanks. He said, “I’m going back to the Camp. That fuck will saw your nuts off with a butter knife.”
It puzzled me, that Red Bush would give up so easily. He was always game for an adventure, the more dangerous the better. And as to somebody sawing your nuts off with a butter knife, that probably wouldn’t happen. Why would you even pick a weapon like that?
Majayko laughed snot-bubbles and looked at me. I followed him, to the rear of the house, where we found a cellar window opening, the window not yet installed. We slipped through into the basement. It smelled new. Like cement and sheetrock and construction dust. A little snow had blown in and I slipped, as my feet hit the floor. I grabbed a lolly column. Majayko grinned and shushed me.
We heard them talking upstairs. Low tones, not angry but not friendly either. Majayko started creeping up the rough-wood temporary staircase. I followed. I wanted to see. I felt compelled to see. And I was confident in my running ability to get me out of a close scrape, if one developed, involving a butter knife.
When we got to the top of the stairs, there was a pallet of mortar bags blocking our way but convenient to hide behind.
The two young men were standing, with their backs to us, watching the girl we knew only as Breslin. She found a broom and was quietly sweeping a clean spot, on the plywood sub-floor. She had lit a candle and placed it on a work table alongside a tile cutter. It flickered and shadowed the unfinished sheetrock wall. She was a few years older than the boys and didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
She scolded, “It’s cold in here. I’m not taking my clothes off. And the floor is dirty.”
Tony Marino said, “How we suppose to do it, you don’t strip off and lay down?”
Breslin said, “Pay me first. I’ll show you.”
The young men dug in their jeans and pulled out a few bills. I couldn’t see how much. But I wanted to know so badly, I nearly asked them. What was about to happen had value. But how much value?
Majayko’s calming hand was on my shoulder. His eyes told me not to make a sound. Part of me had no idea of what was about to happen. Another part of me knew exactly what was to transpire.
Breslin counted the mushed-up bills, opening each one and smoothing it out. She did everything slowly and joylessly. A chunky girl with a large, perfectly round ass that was snugged into those tight jeans, the big guys called cock-teasers.
Breslin opened her short jacket and unbuckled a heavy engineer’s belt. She unzipped the jeans and pulled them down to her knees, bending fully from the waist. And then pulled her feet out of her boots and jeans in two languid motions.
I was staring at a thick pair of legs, long red socks and a dark bush of pubic hair that I found exciting given the fact I had almost none myself. But where were her underpants? I was probably the only one who wondered.
Breslin said, “Alright. Who’s first?”
Tony Marino, pocked face and all, stepped forward.
He said, “I’m not taking sloppy seconds.” He drew down the zipper of his fly but made no attempt to remove so much as his knit watch cap.
She squatted in front of him and all I could see was Tony’s back and the perimeter of Breslin’s frizzy hair moving about busily, in front of him.
Tony said, “OK, OK. Not too much,” He sounded a little shaky.
Breslin rose up from her squat, turned her back to Tony and leaned her hands against the wall. She slid her hands down the wall till her head was as low as her knees. Then backed up slightly and placed her palms on the floor, her legs parted. I noted she was pretty limber for a stout girl.
She said, “Can you see it?”
Tony said, “See what?”
She said, annoyed, “My pussy, you asshole.”
Tony bent his head to one side and approached her. Maybe he had only one good eye. He muttered something I could not make out.
Breslin, still annoyed, said, “Put it in. I’m freezing.”
But Tony had one more thing to do. He took both of his palms, placed them on her naked hips and began to rub vigorously, in circles, as if heating up the girl by way of friction. I wondered. Was that required?
Tony pulled his pants down, to his knees, revealing tight, skinny cheeks; no ass to speak of. He maneuvered close to her, reminding me of a tug boat about to marry up to a barge. His pelvis slapped against her ample ass.
I was mesmerized but not in a completely good way. I actually began to feel a little queasy. Something welled up inside me. Some ancient memory that made me feel like puking. Why, I couldn’t say. The whole display looked so doggy and through my mind flashed a little documentary movie of a friend’s dog named Nippy. A miserable little bitch that got chased around the Camp by a battalion of male dogs trying to attach and glue themselves, to this ugly little mutt, and mercilessly impregnate her, every summer. And every fall, Nippy’s owner Mrs. K would flush the pups down the toilet before their eyes even opened. I closed my eyes till the slapping stopped and Tony shuddered and slowly pulled back.
Then, oddly, I thought, both young men left abruptly. The dangerous castrator Squazzo, apparently only wanted to watch. But he paid too, didn’t he? Yes, he did. To watch? Same as I watched; but I didn’t pay.
Breslin tore off a piece of an empty mortar bag, blew the dust off it, and awkwardly spread her knees and wiped her crotch and thighs. Her eyes glanced in our direction.
Without looking directly at us, she said, “You can come out now, you little fucks. You owe me money.” There were tears running down her cheeks. She started to sob.
Like a shot, I took off down the cellar stairs, chinned myself up and out the cellar window and ran like the wind, through the blowing snow. I wasn’t paying. Even I had any money.
When I stopped to look back for Majayko, who was not a fast runner, he wasn’t there. But I did see Red Bush, creeping round the corner of the house heading for the cellar window. I should have known he wouldn’t miss out on something like that. He watched the whole business from a window and now he wanted more. There were nine kids in the Bush family. Everyone a redhead. There was never enough of anything except red hair. Red Bush always wanted more. As did Majayko, who didn’t have much of anything.
PART 5
Several years passed. I was in college studying physics and math, subjects that interested me, but I was never very good at. One Friday evening, I was wrestling with homework when there was a knock at the door. My Dad answered the door and informed me Majayko was standing on the steps. He said it disapprovingly, as if he would chase him off, if I didn’t care to see him. I hadn’t seen him in over a year and had no idea what he was up to.
There was something odd about him, standing there in the cool fall night. He looked disheveled. But worse, he looked like he might be losing his mind. His eyes seemed to be out of focus. He was looking at me but not really seeing me. I asked if I could help him.
He said, “You got any change. I need bus fare. We just got back from vacation. There’s no food in the house.”
“Where are you living?” I asked.
“I got to get back to my wife. Our kid. He needs to eat.”
I said, “You’re married? You got a kid?”
He seemed not hear me. He asked again for bus fare.
At the time I had a little Triumph sports car I bought with money from a summer job.
I said, “Let me grab my coat. I’ll drive you home.”
I got my coat and wallet and led him to the car. I said, “We’ll stop at the deli and get your family some food.”
We stopped in our local deli operated by a German family we each knew from childhood. I bought cold cuts, bread, mustard. Some desert custards, in little, returnable pyrex cups. And milk and cookies, for the kid. Mrs Braren, the old lady who ran the deli for decades and survived Hitler’s Germany, looked both of us over, as if seeing us for the first time. As she cut the meat and cheese, I could see her watching us, a suspicious look in her eyes.
I said to Mrs. Braren, “Majayko just got back from vacation. He has no food in the house for his kid.” She nodded but said nothing.
Majayko said, “We just got back from vacation. Me and Breslin and the kid.”
I said, “Really? You married that girl Breslin?”
“She’s my wife now. We have a son.”
“That’s very nice. I’m happy for you. Where did you go? On vacation?” This was confusing me. Something didn’t make sense.
He said, “Didn’t you get my post cards?”
I said, “No. I didn’t.”
He said, “We went to Paris. I sent you a post card with the Eiffel Tower.”
I said, “No. Maybe it went to the wrong address. How long were you in Paris?”
He said, “We went from Paris to the Grand Canyon. Did you get that card. Looking down into the canyon? When you look straight down you feel like jumping.”
I said, “No. I didn’t get that one either.”
He said, “And … and the Bronx Zoo. I sent a postcard with monkeys.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.
Mrs. Braren looked at us as if trying to decide which one of us had lost his mind. She apparently knew more about Majayko than I did and was wondering how I could be swallowing his story. She carefully packed the food in a brown paper shopping bag with hand holds. I paid her and she gave me change. As I reached for the change, she grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye and said, “Be careful.” I nodded.
I drove to Westchester Square where Majayko said he lived with his family. I parked under the elevated tracks of the number six subway line, just as a train came clattering to a screeching stop.
His room was practically on the tracks. It was located above a seedy bar and the view through the begrimed window was of the train’s shiny steel wheels. There was something merciless about those wheels. Like the meat cutter in Mrs. Braren’s deli. The room was furnished with a bed, a dresser and a chair. No refrigerator. The bathroom was down the hall.
I asked where his wife and child were.
He said, “They don’t live here anymore.”
I said, “Well a … are you still married?”
“Yeah. She lives down in Manhattan now.”
“With your son?”
He said, “Yeah. They live near Kipps Bay Boys Club. Near the orphanage.”
It all sounded kind of muddled to me. I said, “There’s no refrigerator here for the food. Why don’t I drive you to Manhattan. Where your family is.”
“You can’t drive there.”
“Why can’t I drive there?”
“We can take the subway. You won’t have to give up your parking spot.”
“I can always find another parking spot.”
“No,” he said. You have to take the subway to get there. Take the number six to 125th street and catch the Express to Grand Central. Then take the shuttle to 42nd Street."
That didn’t sound to be the way to Kips Bay, I thought.
He picked up the grocery bag and walked out the door, as if I wasn’t there. I followed. Not sure what was going on in his head but feeling some responsibility to find out what the end game was here. I couldn’t leave him, and strange as it may seem, I was curious how this would end. Was there a wife and child? Did they live on the East Side. If so why was he headed to mid-town? Times Square? I had the odd feeling that it didn’t really matter where we ended up. Majayko just needed to go somewhere. With a bag of groceries. And it had to be via the NYC subway system. I decided not to go with him.
Majayko and I had traveled to Manhattan via subway many times. Usually to visit the Central Park Zoo. That place ran an insane asylum for monkeys. Very entertaining but hygiene dangerous. The monkeys hated the staring humans. They’d masturbate at them. They’d shit in their hands and throw the stuff at them. Great fun until the zoo installed plexiglass on the bars putting a stop to the missile launches. Some visitors found the monkey behavior offensive. Others, like us, were disappointed that the show was over.
But the thing that bothered me about our subway trips was not the monkeys. It was Majayko’s peculiar affinity for express trains. He liked to lean into an approaching high-speed express. To the point the train operator had to blow his horn. Majayko would pull back with a big, shit-eating grin on his face as the train sped, non-stop, through the station. But worse than that, if I wasn’t paying attention, he’d give me a sudden push that might have landed me down on the tracks with a train approaching. Luckily, I have good reflexes and was able to maintain my balance. After a few of these incidents, I never stood close to the edge of the platform and was prepared for such a push. I wondered, if he did manage to push me off the platform, would he follow me. I had an instinctive feeling that he wanted a shared experience with another human being.
But anyway, what happened is Majayko took the bag of groceries and climbed the steps to the Westchester Square station. He waved good bye. I leaned on my car’s fender and listened for the approaching train. As the train began screeching to a stop, its horn blew and several small objects rained down from between the tracks. The objects burst on the Belgian blocks, a few feet from my car. Pyrex cups of Mrs Braren’s homemade custard. Then a large splash of blood followed by a steady drip and a loaf of Wonder Bread. God’s dice, well played.