Polio Summer and Other Close Calls

It was about 1949 or 1950, a few years before we moved six blocks to East 17th Street and Cortelyou Road, pre-Jonas Salk, that a polio epidemic hit Brooklyn. An older guy named "Rabbit" was the only victim I knew, and he was able to walk, with leg braces and then a cane,in the years after it was over. I don't know if it had anything to do with my adventures looking down sewers or just what was going around, but I think I had a mild case and scared my mother as she hadn't been so frightened since the telegram about my brother being wounded. There were other brushes with death or serious injury, too, but they were all sudden and over before we could reflect on them.

I think all our parents had instituted an unofficial quarantine: "No playing in groups, stay around home, it's contagious." I had two summer reading places, the hammock in the back yard between a pole and an unproductive apple tree, and a rattan couch on the porch. It was there that I read the Brooklyn Eagle accounts of the rising toll of victims, not covered in such neighborly detail by the city-wide oriented Daily News. Sore throat, weakness, and then paralysis. One evening I had them all.

I swear I did.

It wasn't just in my head the way my med-student brother would later insist some of my alleged medical problems were.

I did feel weak, my throat was sore, and maybe I, too, had polio. I decided to get up and take what might be my last walk around the house, down the wooden steps, between the two blue spruces, one of which my father decorated with lights for Christmas, past the row of turkey-sized rocks that marked the edge of our lawn, for laying bricks was expensive, up our slanted driveway that had been paved once, long ago, but only patched since, past the raised dining room windows and what used to be the chicken pen before the neighbors complained after the War, past the grape trellis that produced good purple grapes that had thick skins, too thick to eat, but those grapes were sweet to squeeze out of their skins, seedless, and past the space under the back porch that served as chicken coop and then as place to store my balloon tire bike--why hadn`t I listened to my father who had suggested an "English racer" for the only bicycle he would buy me? But that was later, for all I had that summer was a carefully repainted two-wheeler with purple velvet re-covered seat and sixteen-inch solid rubber tires that in its last year I would jump off and crash on purpose. I didn't think of taking it for a last spin. I really did feel weak.

I was feeling even weaker as I walked down the alley between our house and the Pitt's house. Later they would have a motel and cabins at Greenwood Lake we would rent and my father would ask, when we visited them, how embarrassing, "Is the room free?" not meaning money but reservations and big Mr. Pitt would say "Nothing's free" before my father would hand over a twenty and get change and not be bothered about his choice of words, although I was.

It was the same alley, that I had run up when I threw a rock at a fat colored woman with shopping bags who was walking up our block when I was four or five, not throwing out of malice--or was I?--or anything my family taught me, directly or not, but I knew it was wrong and the rock bounced between her legs and I ran and hid and she pounded on the door, my mother told me, and yelled at my mother who didn't know what she was talking about but lectured me because she suspected I could do something stupid and mean like that.

My mother also knew that I did not feel well that night, and she also suspected and was afraid that I had polio, and I was afraid, too, from reading the papers and seeing photos of iron lungs.

The next morning I felt great and had my breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice or stewed rhubarb and bacon and eggs and toast and milk. No doubt a mild case of polio, not just something in my head because I read the Broolyn Eagle. I dashed out from between two cars once and someone had to slam on his brakes. Twice, because after I saw him coming to a stop, I figured he'd stop completely, so I kept running. Good brakes for the late 40's.

Occasionally, kids were hit by trains in the Long Island Railroad cut that ran across Flatbush, from east to west, and a woman my mother knew lost a son that way, or maybe he touched a live wire while walking atop a train. The cut was rarely used, the fences were old, and we could go down on the tracks, being careful to watch for trains, but sometimes we weren't, as once when we were building a flimsy wood barrier on the tracks and I happened to look up and see a train just a block or so away. Maybe the engineer was waiting a few extra seconds to scare the shit out of us with his diesel horn. We ran up the bank and watched as the freight train rumbled by, scary even at thirty-five miles per hour for its size and how it sneaked up on us.

There was a car crash at the corner of Dorchester and Argyll. I got there too late to see the bodies of what we were told were two brothers in an old car going too fast, but there was a pool of dark blood in a short of basin formed by the roots of a tree near the corner that their car had hit at probably sixty miles an hour, too fast for even that wide street. But aside from that accident and a gang shooting a few blocks away, death was mostly in the newspapers for us.