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Blue Book and I were playing stoop ball against Matt and Nate one Saturday and just as Blue Book went up to the wall to hit, a pigeon on the third floor released a thick wad that dropped down and landed right on top of Blue Book's head. Saturday was not one of his treatment days, so he was not wearing his felt snap-brimmed hat. He stopped in the middle of his approach to the wall and looked up.
I was leaning against a car waiting for my at-bat. He came over and pointed to the top of his head. "What is it?" he asked.
I said that it was a white and green substance. "With a touch of yellow," I said.
"Is it pigeon shit?"
I said that I thought it was.
"Which pigeon did it?" He was totally calm.
I pointed to three clustered together on the third floor cornice. The one in the center was puffed up and huddled into itself. It had ruffled feathers. "I think it was one of them," I said.
"Thank you," he said. He took a short run-up, and with all his force, hurled the spaldeen submarine-style up at the cornice. It landed right in the middle of the cluster--a direct hit. Feathers fluttered everywhere, two pigeons flew off in opposite directions and the sick pigeon dropped straight down and landed at the base of the wall.
"You son of a bitch!" Blue Book howled and he kicked the pigeon fifteen feet through the air right over the head of an old lady in a wheel chair who was being wheeled uphill along West End Avenue from 87th Street by a stout lady in a corset and a white nurse's uniform.
The old lady sitting in the wheel chair was wearing a hat with a veil and didn't see the pigeon, but the lady in the nurse's uniform did. At the same time, she heard Blue Book howl and saw him charging toward her with a crazed expression. She released the handles of the wheel chair, fell over backwards and rocked back on her corset with her legs and stockings and undergarments raised high above her head.
Blue Book rushed into the gap between the nurse and the wheelchair and got in another kick. This time the pigeon arced out ten feet high over West End Avenue where it struck the windshield of one of the red and brown Orange and Rockland County buses that used to go up West End on their way to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey.
The driver swerved instinctively and hit the pushcart of the sharp-tongued fruit and vegetable peddler we called Pop as he was maneuvering his cart laden with plums, peaches, cantaloupes and other rolling things downhill on West End Avenue towards 87thStreet.
It took fifteen minutes for the police to arrive and that whole time the driver of the bus was on his hands and knees looking under cars for the pigeon to try to prove his story.
Blue Book disappeared, I grabbed the wheelchair, which had started rolling backwards, and Nate and Matt helped the lady in the nurse's uniform back to her feet.
Years later, every time I read my kids the story of how Rumpelstiltskin flew into a fury, and stamped his foot so hard he sank into the ground up to his waist, and how he grabbed his other foot in both hands and tore himself in half, it always brought back the memory of Blue Book howling and kicking the pigeon that day and charging after it and kicking it again, this time even harder.
Name: Herb Lobsenz Website: oldtimewriter.com
I'm trying to prevent the disappearance of interesting people, places and deeds I've run into by preserving their memory in writing. So far my oldtimewriter blog covers Manhattan in the 1930s, 40s and 50s--marble shooting, stoop ball, punch ball, the milkman, the organ grinder, the streetsweeper, the iceman, Frankie the Fixer, Abner the Stooper, Lockup Bill, The Penguin, Cedric the Singles Hitter. Future recollections will include Joe Louis, the Polo Grounds, the baseball Giants, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean War.
If you like what you've read and would like to see more, please visit oldtimewriter.com. If you have comments or recollections of your own you'd like to post you may do so on the blog page--no password required Excerpts from my novels and short stories are on the website too and you may order copies of my latest novel, SUCCESSION, at a 20% discount.
Rockland Polo
