(Originally published 9/29/11)
As I
recall, Mr. and Mrs. Lynch—the hosts of this get-together—were genial enough.
The man of the house once ran a successful bar business in the big city, and
his Misses—I subsequently learned as an adult—was both his second wife and his
niece. Anyway, reminiscences from such a tender age are typically confined to
disjointed snippets from a wide-eyed kid’s unique perspective—of moments good
and bad; important and unimportant.
As I saw
it from my six- or seven-year-old eyes, the Lynch’s house was in an incredibly
atmospheric sliver of geography. It lorded over a piece of real estate
everybody knew back then as "Shanty Town," a neighborhood with rows
of old houses and some shacks, too—relics from a hardscrabble past. Hoovervilles.
Some of Shanty Town’s residents raised chickens in coops and had farm animals grazing
in their front and backyards. But I was also a guest in a home not too far from
a busy railroad, the Harlem River Ship Canal, and the elevated subway tracks of
the Number 1 train. There was an intoxicating ambiance surrounding the Lynch’s
humble abode, with sounds emanating from nearby trains and boats. But beyond
these general memories of welcome sensory sensations, I recall only one
concrete detail surrounding this Marble Hill adventure of mine.
Mrs. Lynch,
the lady of the house, spoke in a throaty, Betty Davis-esque voice from—I have
since concluded—one too many Marlboros and an unquenchable thirst for firewater.
She was pleasant enough on the surface, but—from my little boy’s view of the
world—there was something of the night about her. She was quite petite, always
wore bright red lipstick, and looked by day a little too much like the Joker
from Batman—as played by Cesar Romero—for me to fully warm to her. By
night, it got worse, and she resembled a vampire, which I know is hip now, but
it was not back then.
Here now
is my only definitive memory of being in that house more than forty years ago.
Mrs. Lynch very graciously gave the youngsters on the scene free run of her
place. She asked only one thing of us—that we keep our distance from an
automobile tire flatly resting atop the stairs in her two-story home. I admit
to being fascinated by this car tire in a spot where car tires were not usually
found.
Flash
forward three decades and I recounted this peculiar memory, so etched in mind,
to a friend of mine. He said, “That’s probably where she kept her stash.” While
it does make some sense that a person might conceal his or her bottles of hooch
in a car tire—if secrecy is the name of the game—it seems rather illogical to
do so in a tire sitting at the top of a staircase, where the logical question
passersby would pose is: “What is a car tire doing there?” But that is as good
an explanation as any that I have heard before or since. Memories, yes, and
unsolved mysteries as well.
(Photo
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
