Displaced Snippets of Bayonne by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Page 60
#12- We Move Downtown
Perhaps in anticipation of the anti-bourgeois things to soon come, a year or two after I started grammar school, Mom and Dad decided to move three blocks further downtown. The third floor apartment provided a view of the school and yard right across the street.
399 Avenue C; property of the author.
About half of the building’s residents were survivors of Hitler’s camps. They’d often go walking at night; up and down the street; men in fedoras and women in babushkas. They’d always stay on that one block of Avenue C, between Andrew and 17th Streets. I don’t know anything of them as they never talked to me. I never saw them talking to anyone else either, and I don’t blame them.
Displaced Snippets of Bayonne Page 61
Max and Sam owned the building and lived a few blocks away.
Both lawyers, they took advantage of some of the un-rescinded WWII laws aimed at fuel conservation. Heat levels were never exorbitant in the winters, and Mom would periodically say some choice words about the situation.
The building’s janitor, Nick Devorek was in his thirties.
He and his family of four got a free apartment for his services; which most of the time was nothing, except bringing the garbage cans from the creepy enclosure downstairs to somewhere else.
Either that or he and his family ate them.
When I was about 15 he developed some kind of problem with me. A few time he approached me when I was alone saying; “You bad man,” as if he was looking for a fight. My standard reply was to shrug my shoulders and say; “Well, you know.” He’d then stand there a few seconds before leaving. I really didn’t want to kick his ass, or even talk to him for that matter, as I was afraid I’d walk away smelling of garbage.
The first such encounter contained some amusing banter which I don’t remember. He spoke English by way of Latvia or some other shithole Northern European country Putin owns, and I thought he had said; “You Batman.”
Displaced Snippets of Bayonne