The End of a Brooklyn Summer – Part 2

It’s important to note that this short series is a work of fiction based on true events. The first part of this story is posted here. Enjoy!

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Most memorable moments in any child’s young, impressionable life happen during the summer. Family vacations. Day trips to the beach. No worrying about homework, just the dreadful summer reading list with dozens of pages worth of book reports casting the only shadow that’s supposed to be over every kid who had been shuffled through the public school system.

I never understood mandatory reading assignments. How did teachers know who actually read the book? Couldn’t you have someone do the report for you? Faking you did your summer reading was a hell of a lot easier than wasting a breath opening a beat-up library book. Needless to say, I had more important things to do over summer break than complete assigned reading.

Don’t misinterpret my passionate distaste for summer reading. I love books. I always have. I majored in English in college before turning to a career in journalism. The written word is my life. The plots and weak protagonists in school-assigned books were usually subpar. I also hated being told what to read.

No kid wanted to be stuck inside all summer reading a book chosen for them based on a standardized curriculum. I wasn’t think that at the time, but now I know why I hated summer reading so much. With how hot it was that first day of summer break and the story that would soon unfold, I might have benefited from staying indoors and digging my nose in a good book.

It was the summer in the 90s. I was a free-willed elementary-aged tomboy growing up in Brooklyn who hated wearing dresses, doing my hair or playing with Barbie dolls. I was happy wearing old jeans, a scuffed pair of Converse and a plain t-shirt. Riding my bike, playing handball with the neighborhood boys and a few solo rounds of stoop ball were some of my favorite pastimes when I wasn’t hanging out with grandpa.

After I was told to head back home, I lingered for a bit, wrote my name with the toe of my sneakers in the thin layer of break dust resting on top of the cold concrete. I rocked back on my heels with my hands in my pockets and waited for my grandpa to look up.

“You can help with the next one, kid,” my grandpa said. His distinct baritone voice echoed in Mario’s shop.

I backpedaled a bit, did a soft fist pump in excitement and turned around toward the door. I slowly dragged my feet, kicking up the stale dust that settled onto the garage floor over the decades and covered my penmanship.

My bike’s handlebars, well-rested in Mario’s office, were still hot to the touch. No matter how hard I tried to avoid grazing the frame, I could still feel the heat permeating from the aluminum onto my skin. I tipped the bike upright, rolled it backward as I awkwardly extended my right leg behind me so I could use it to prop open the heavy rusted door. Out I went.

When the light hit the rims of my bike, it produced the strongest glare imaginable. It was almost as if I was seeing light for the first time in ages when in fact I’ve was in the darkness of Mario’s shop for no more than 10 minutes.

I remember, in that moment, questioning whether or not to listen to the demand to head home. I had a choice to make: do I head right home? Or do I go to the diner on Rockaway Parkway for a soda?

You guessed correctly – off to the diner I went.

My lack of eagerness to head home wasn’t new. Home always felt different. There was an unusually eerie and sorrowfulness resting inside those walls. The chaos would push anyone away. It was still home and yet I could never figure out why.

I peddled fast past the house in case someone was outside. You could see the corner from the sidewalk out front and the last thing I wanted was my name echoing down the street. My legs pumped hard as the bike jerked side to side like chaotic windshield wipers. The hot wind stung my face and twisted my hair back into tangled knots. As soon as I got past the bank, I made a hard right before hitting the curb, skidded a bit and pushed off on the peddles again toward the diner.

The diner was a hole-in-the-wall joint next to a vacant parking lot with stiff grass patches pushed through the blacktop and, after decades of neglect, had potholes that left leaving broken chunks of debris all around. It was surrounded by a chain link fence on three sides. The diner acting as the third wall. The side wall of the diner was exposed to the world, but just like the inside it matched the faded era it once came from.

It was a trailer-sized diner right out of the 1950s. The owners neglected to keep the place up-to-date over the years and it showed. The glass on the entrance door faded from the inside, the “R” was missing from the “diner” part of the sign out front and there was a poster stuck on the window advertising 50 cent milkshakes and fries.

On the interior sat an old, and functioning, jukebox that was within arm’s reach of the front door. Ten small tables, a booth at the front formed almost an L-shape on the exterior of the room and a long red metallic counter extended in the middle from the cash register at the front to the bathrooms in the back. It had several backless swivel chairs topped by red, cracked pleather seats. When they barely swiveled, they screeched. Like nails-to-a-chalkboard screech.

I rolled my bike in toward the back table closest to the bathroom. Judy was coming out of the steaming kitchen with a tray of burgers, fries and a bottle of ketchup.

“Hi, hun,” she said. “No grandpa today?”

“Nope. Just me. Can I get a coke, please?”

Judy spent 20 years of her life working in that diner. She knew every regular who came in and their order. Her hair delicately pinned and tucked up under a light blue scarf, a dress that changed with the seasons and white tennis shoes that squeaked when she walked out of the kitchen.

No matter the time of day, when my grandpa and I walked in the door on a Judy day, she hollered our order to the kitchen.

“Two orders, sunnyside eggs, overdone bacon and white toast”

She always brought a coffee for grandpa and two pulp-free orange juices in thick plastic cups no bigger than a double shot glass.

I pivoted my bike so it would lean against one side of the table without getting in the way, took a seat on the opposite side, intertwined my fingers and placed them and my forearms onto the cold table.

“Here ya go, hun. No charge today. It’s a hot one,” Judy said.

Slowly pulling the soda up out of the glass with the thin-plastic straw, my foot tapped to the metallic beat of the old clock on the wall. Quenching my thirst wasn’t enough to take my mind off of what was waiting for me on E. 99th Street.