My First Pair of Jeans

                                               

1952 or 3, Baltimore, Maryland.

My father liked characters. He collected them. If he had been a writer it would have been a Damon Runyon, a Ring Lardner, an A.J. Liebling. Ruby was no kind of bandit but he enjoyed keeping track of the small time hustlers who worked the neighborhood: the bag man, the bookie, the street preacher, colored men (known as street Arabs) on mule drawn wagons hawking fruits and vegetables, women sitting on stoops, church women with enormous hats, neighborhood kids running every which way. He owned and operated the Ruby Tire Company (or Rooby Tar as spoken by a native Baltimorean) where he retreaded bald tires and sold new ones in just about the poorest neighborhood in the city. I worked there from the age of eleven until Ruby died in 1963. The world that encompassed Ruby Tire was made up largely of narrow alleyways lined with warrens of row houses built after the civil war. The “place” (which is how the family referred to it) was on Fremont Avenue bordering an alley, and sat back a block from where Fremont intersected with Baltimore Street, a lively though shabby thoroughfare that began deteriorating before I was born. It was lined by small businesses, many of which were already closed and boarded. Gray was the dominant color. Louis the Greek’s was the restaurant just on the other side of Baltimore Street where I ate many, many plates of hamburger steak smothered in onion gravy, with a pick-up stix pile of French fries. Louis had a picture of his son, a wrestler in tights, on the wall above the counter. Up the street a way was a gypsy fortune-teller who was always trying to entice me into her shop. I say entice but, really, she’d pop out of her door and try to drag me in by my arm. She’d also be trying to nick my wallet with her other hand, but I always pulled away from her. It was annoying but it was also funny, a little something to make the walk more interesting.

            On this particular Spring day, somewhere in the really early fifties, I had saved up the money to buy my first pair of dungarees from the Hecht Bros. department store and was walking back to Ruby Tire down Baltimore Street with them on. It was really an act of rebellion (though I hadn’t yet thought of it that way), my first stylistic break with the Ivy League uniform of khakis and button down oxford blue shirts. The only other guys who wore dungarees back then were bikers, gentile guys from tough neighborhoods, and those who worked in cornfields. The new dungarees were very stiff, and I had them folded up to about a one-foot cuff to keep from tripping. The idea was to get into a bathtub with them on, get out and let them dry on you so they conformed to your particular shape and size. Miraculously, my stomach would be firm and my hips would finally be narrower than my shoulders, but, even as it was, I was feeling pretty cool. Then the gypsy jumped out from her doorway like one of those spiders that leap from ambush as an unsuspecting bug strolls by. “C’mere, c’mere,” she said and tried to grab my shirt. I twisted away. “What do you think I’m going to do with you?” she asked.

 “I don’t have any money,” I protested.

             “Who said money?” She made it sound like a command. “Stop. C’mere, You think you look good, kid, but you look stupid.”

“Huh?”

“Come on. C’mere.” She waved me over. I still didn’t move. She sighed and shrugged and got down on her knees right there on the sidewalk then waved me over again, and this time I went. She unrolled my one-foot cuffs and refolded each of them meticulously as a two-inch cuff that she folded up to size until it rested lightly on the laces of my desert boot. “There,” she said and smiled at her work. “Help me up,” she said and used my knee to give herself a boost. That fast she had my wallet out of my back pocket and turned inside out looking for money. When she didn’t find any she tossed it back. “You get a fashion tip it’s worth something. What’s in your pocket?” she asked.

“Nothing,” and turned them inside out to demonstrate.

“You owe me, boy,” she said. “Come back and I’ll tell yer fortune half price. Yer daddy, too.”  I must have looked surprised at that. “Rooby Tar,” she said.”  Yer  Rooby’s boy. I know who you are.”