Scratch On The Stoop

I was Charlie Wang’s friend and he became one of the richest men in the world as CEO of Computer Associates and then a whole host of other enterpirises including the New York Islanders hockey team. We went to Brooklyn Tech together and were in the same glasses for two years and met on the subway every morning and afternoon. We also played a lot of basketball together either t the school or at my house.  Mr. Schroegren who owned the largest head in the world, which accompanied the largest heart in the world, was our Industrial Processes teacher when we were freshmen. Charlie and I grew apart as I started to fail courses and cut classes and started to drink and use drugs. I pissed away a great education by heading to downtown Brooklyn everyday to shoot pool with Bob Trzcinski. We stole records out of the department stores; later he owned a record store and for thirty years owning his store he looked under every customer’s coat. Bob would ridicule me when he was feeling nasty. He’d c...

I’m not sure if it was the summer of 1949 or the summer of 1950 but in either case it was my first summer in Southampton. We moved into a small country cottage on a bucolic street. Halsey Street ran from Hill Street all the way over to the large water tower. It was not a through street, ending at the tower; it was a private street lined with trees. The houses were about forty or fifty feet from each other. Each parcel was about a quarter of an acre. Everybody had a backyard and the backyard that they had was private. Every house had a car. In every house was a child. It was a young block. Everybody knew everybody else. And everybody watched out for everybody else. My next door neighbor and my first friend was Blair Poirier. He had a younger brother, Bruce Poirier. Bruce sadly had polio and could only walk with braces. He was also three years younger than us and therefore we were not inclined to include him in a play though when we could we would. Blair’s father Dick Poirier worked at ...

In fact all of the events of the summer just unveiled were paled in comparison to the first Sunday in August. Indeed, the significant, the most significant event that still remains somewhat shrouded, and has mystically guided my life ever since took place during an hour, which was occupied by only me and Mother Nature. Although Bruce was assigned the task of babysitting every night, he often waited for my mother and father to leave in the band’s bus to go to the hotel. He would then run over to see his friend Artie. There, they would smoke and drink beer and talk. And even when my father was off, my folks did not have the ability to sit' at home like most of families. They were musicians, entertainers and they enjoyed the right of passage, that is, to do what they will. They deviated their schedule every single night throughout my childhood. Needless to say my brother Bruce had been hurt on both ends in that they abandoned him to our grandparents and then abandoned both of us in ...

My Father, Herm Scratchenton, took a job with the band at DelMonicos upstate in Saratoga in the summer of 1948. DelMonicos was located in a very large structure almost in the middle of Saratoga’s downtown. But we lived out of town in a cabin in a camp on Lonely Lake. Before World War Two, Saratoga had the makeup of a midsized metropolis in the country. A number of large Victorian hotels gave the town a cultivated presence; local residents were given to flaunt their own homes as well as the town’s great public spaces with their internationally famous racecourse. There’s the famous Saratoga Springs, which brought many of the populace to the area in the first place. The residential area around the downtown hub was designed to a density of about six homes per acre, on a grid of tree-lined streets. Beyond the residential neighborhoods were the farms. Beyond the farms was the wooded forest. The band had about twenty musicians and four or five show girls. The only showgirl I remember was H...