DR. KLORMAN AND THE POLICE (standard:non fiction, 1258 words)
Author: THE BIG EYE	Added: Jan 16 2005	Views/Reads: 3116/2053	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
a slice of life for a 9 year old, in the bronx, 1934: the good and the bad, or is it the bad and the good!?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

around it. The floor was highly polished parquet wood and the gray 
walls streaked with dirt. The heavy door was closed behind us but not 
locked, and the long waiting began.  After a while I calmed down and 
went over to the thickly screened grimy window and looked down at the 
street.  How I longed to be on that familiar pavement on the way to a 
Saturday morning movie. I  imagined  all  kinds of terrible 
possibilities including being sent ”up the river,"   the euphemism for 
the  Sing Sing prison on the Hudson River,  just north of New York 
City. 

Time seemed to drag by interminably until suddenly the door opened and
with great relief I saw my father outside with some of the other 
parents. I saw the angry look on his face and I became very frightened. 
by the punishment I knew he was going to give me when we got home. We 
were all released   in the custody of our  parents,  with the stern 
warning   not  to antagonize the police or Dr. Klorman.  My father was 
stern and tight-lipped as he led us wordlessly out of the police 
station; we followed a  few steps behind  worried  about the being hit 
with his belt or the cat-o-nine tails hanging on the wall over the 
kitchen table. 

When we got home he delivered us into our mother's hands and
disappeared, never  having said a word.  We later learned that when my 
mother was notified of the arrest of her two sons she went looking for 
my father who was selling  potatoes and onions  from a pushcart in the 
Bathgate Avenue open market, only three blocks  from the police 
station. One of his pushcart peddler friends watched his cart and he 
went home to clean up, and then came  to the  station house. 

My mother followed us up the tenement stairs to our apartment,  sat us
down in the kitchen and  began  to harangue us, in a hard tone without  
raising her voice.  Slowly, inexorably she made us feel how guilty we 
were, how much shame and trouble and we caused the family.  I was 
blamed equally with my brother even though the whole thing had been his 
fault.  I couldn't explain what happened because I was upset and 
tearful. Momma had a  steady stream of condemnations from way back 
when, of all the bad things we had done; she repeated this list, with 
minor variations, until I burst into deep sobs and wails, pleading for 
forgiveness and begging her to stop. 

www.irving-itchy-bronsky.com


Tweet