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“No funny business, boys,” says a white-coated pharmacist, the man behind the counter. He smiles. “Or I’ll tell your parents.”
We’re allowed to explore the one square block of the neighborhood surrounding the apartment building without parental supervision. The limit to our peregrinations is the corner drugstore—the drugstore at the end of the world, where time and space cease. There, the apparent gatekeeper to the next world watches over us warily. But for the sake of his merchandise, not warily enough.
The drugstore is tiny. A front aisle—the counter with a register runs the length of it. All the pharmaceutical paraphernalia is along the wall. Then, there’s a back aisle.
The whole place is maybe 600 square feet tops. Candy and magazines are in the front aisle with over-the-counter medicines on the side of the register, toiletries on the opposite side. In the darker, more-hidden back aisle, there are toys. Bins of cheap plastic cowboys and Indians, toy cars, and rubber balls.
The four of us—Danny, Jack, David, and me—converge there, half-heartedly rifling through the cowboys and Indians, squeezing the rubber balls, then briefly bouncing them to test their worthiness for our throw-the-ball-against-the-building-wall game. But we’d only made about a dollar with our phantom tollbooth, and I don’t really want any of this junk anyway.
Danny signals for us to spread out. We’re too tightly packed in one corner at the back of the aisle, and the pharmacist keeps eyeing us.
“Peter,” Danny whispers. “You and Jack go to the front aisle. Pretend like you want some baseball cards or something.”
“But I do want some baseball cards,” I say too loudly. “I need to complete my Cub—”
“Just go! Both of you. I need some cowboys for my collection.” He looks up to see if the pharmacist is watching before pocketing a few cowboys.
Jack and I head to the front aisle. I go to the baseball cards, Jack to the candy.
All we have to do is wait until he looks down to fulfill a prescription or looks up to the cash register to ring a sale. Then we pounce. Snickers bars, Milky Ways, Juicy Fruit gum—and my personal favorite—baseball cards with the enclosed stale pink rectangle of cardboard-like bubble gum.
* * *
Those baseball cards were always the hardest to pilfer because they were by the register.
That’s not to say we never paid for stuff. We did. Plenty. After all, we had to keep up the front of being law-abiding, baseball-card-collecting five-to-seven-year-olds. But that ended up creating a problem. My small weekly allowance wasn’t enough to cover the cost of my growing collection. And the Chicago Cubs of the mid-late 1960s were my heroes. I wanted the complete team—and only had the Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, and Billy Williams cards. Try as I might, I couldn’t nab the Ferguson Jenkins, their star pitcher.
Because of our limited success extorting dimes from old ladies passing through our phantom tollbooth, I had to find other means to fund my cause. And I did. I’d buy three and four packs of baseball cards—I liked to chew on four of those cardboard bubblegum sticks at a time—then steal some candy. It seemed like a fair tradeoff.
Of course, the ruse could last for only so long before we eventually were caught. The pharmacist, as promised, did tell our parents, who made us vow to behave. He reluctantly let us back in the store. We behaved for a while before starting up again . . . but more discreetly.
Our kleptomania—fueled as much by the thrill of it as by the desire to build baseball card collections and the like—was limited to the drugstore. Luckily for local merchants, there weren’t many other opportunities within our limited boundaries. There wasn’t any commercial activity on Sheridan Road at all, save for a flower shop and the little barbershop in the basement of one of those sedate high-rises.
My dad would take my brother and me to the barbershop for our once-a-month trim by Sal, Phil, Joe, or some other monosyllabically named guy. The barber, his name embroidered in cursive on his sky blue jacket, would lift us up to the booster seat atop his chair and trim the two of us in the time it took another guy to take care of my dad. We’d receive a lollipop for our troubles. No need—or opportunity—to steal candy there.
Broadway—with its seemingly endless commercial activity—was another story. It was the verboten land. The land of Uptown, where bands of Puerto Ricans from the rougher uptown neighborhoods roamed. They seemed to mark their east-west and north-south boundaries on the corner of our drugstore. Broadway suddenly materialized like a random river branch out of Clark Street, just three blocks south of us.
Unlike its New York City namesake, it never became all that broad. It wended its way up north, as if trying to reconnect to its source—but instead, somewhat ironically, merged and disappeared into Sheridan Road, some six miles uptown.
Was this the street grid’s way of telling me that if I traveled far enough, the twin poles of my world—privilege to the east, struggle to the west—would eventually merge into some kind of blissful perfection?
* * *
Too soon to tell. For now, the admonition remains: We’re allowed to go up to Broadway and enter the corner drugstore, with its corner-facing entrance, but not to walk down the street itself.
Next
Chapter 4,