It's Kind of a Funny Story

Our family lived in a crappy apartment in Manhattan. I didn’t know it was crappy at the time, because I didn’t have our better apartment to compare it to yet. But there was exposed piping. That’s no good. You don’t want to raise your child in a house with exposed piping. I remember there was a green pipe and a red pipe and a white pipe, gathered near the corner of the hallway just before the bathroom, and as soon as I could walk I investigated them all, walked up to them and put my palm about two millimeters away from each one to test if it was hot or cold. One was cold, one was hot, and the red one was really hot. Two millimeters wasn’t enough. I burned myself on it and Dad, who hadn’t realized ("It must only get hot in the afternoon"), encased it in dark gray foam with duct tape, but duct tape never stopped me and I thought the foam was fun to pick at and chew so I picked it off and chewed it and then when other kids came over to my house I dared them to touch the re-exposed pipe; I told them anyone who came in had to touch it, otherwise they were a pussy, which was a word I learned from Dad watching TV, which I thought was great because it was a word with two meanings: the cat that girls liked and the thing you called people to make them do stuff. Just like chicken had two meanings: the bird that walked around and the white stuff you ate. Some people touched the hot pipe if you called them chicken as well.

I had my own room but I didn’t like to be alone in it; the only room I liked to be in was the living room, under the table that held all the encyclopedias. I made it my little fort; I put a blanket over me and worked in there, with a light that Dad rigged up. I worked on maps. I loved maps. I knew that we lived in Manhattan and I had a map of it, a Hagstrom Five Borough Atlas with all the streets laid out. I knew exactly where we lived, on the comer of 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue. Third Avenue was a yellow street because it was an avenue, big and long and important. Fifty-third Street was a little white street that went across Manhattan. The streets went sideways and the avenues went up-and-down; that was all you had to remember. (Dad helped me remember, too, when we went out for pancakes. He would ask, “Do you want them cut in streets and avenues, Craig?” And I’d go “Yes!” and he’d cut the stack of pancakes in a grid, and we’d name each street and avenue as we went along, making sure to get 3rd Ave. and 53rd Street.) It was so simple. If you were really advanced (like I was, duh), you knew that traffic on the even streets went east (East for Even) and the odd streets went west (West is Odd). Then, every bunch of streets, there were fat yellow streets, like the avenues, that went both ways. These were the famous streets: 42nd St., 34th St. The complete list from the bottom up was Chambers St., Canal St., Houston St., 14th St., 23rd St., 34th St., 42nd St., 57th St., 72nd St. (there wasn’t any big street in the 60s; they got shafted), 79th St., 86th St., 96th St., and then you were in Harlem, where Manhattan effectively ended for little white boys who made forts under encyclopedias and studied maps.

As soon as I saw the Manhattan map, I wanted to draw it. I should be able to draw the place where I lived. So I asked Mom for tracing paper and she got it for me and I brought it into my fort and I pointed the light right down on the first map in the Hagstrom Atlas—downtown, where Wall Street was and the stock market worked. The streets were crazy down there; they didn’t have any kind of streets and avenues; they just had names and they looked like a game of Pick-Up Sticks. But before I could even worry about the streets, I had to get the land right. Manhattan was actually built on land. Sometimes when they were digging up the streets you saw it down there—real dirt! And the land had a certain curve to it at the bottom of the island, like a dinosaur head, bumpy on the right and straight on the left, a swooping majestic bottom.

I held my tracing paper down and tried to trace the line of lower Manhattan.

I couldn’t do it.

I mean, it was ridiculous. My line didn’t have anything to do with the real one. I didn’t understand—I was holding the tracing paper steady. I looked at my small hand. “Stay still,” I told it. I crumpled up the paper and tried again.

The line wasn’t right again. It didn’t have the swoop.

I crumpled up the paper and tried again.

This line was even worse than before. Manhattan looked square.

I tried again.

Oh boy, now it looked like a duck.

Crumple.

Now it looked like a turd, another word I picked up from Dad.

Crumple.

Now it looked like a piece of fruit.