GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

When I walked into Carey's apartment I could see the phone cord disappearing into the stack of sofa cushions.  The previous day we had buried his telephone in the middle of six cushions and then topped it off with a dining room chair to help stabilize things.  The mound was the result of an experiment to see if we could deaden the sound of his phone which had been ringing almost non-stop for several days.  Carey had tried to break things off with some girl after a brief fling but she was determined to get in the last word.  She had Carey's phone number but thankfully did not know where he lived.  Carey could have simply disconnected the phone but that wouldn't have been as interesting.  The phone had continued to ring while we were constructing our cone of silence and I had asked Carey if I could give it a try.  Carey said, "It's pointless.  This girl can't take a hint.  But sure, go ahead.  Knock yourself out." I picked up the phon...

When I was a kid, the thing I was most impressed with about street cars were the seats.  They were more like benches than chairs and both the seats and the seatbacks were made of narrow strips of wood butted up against each other.  All of the seat backs had a wrought iron handle on the aisle side.  You could grip the handle and pivot the seatbacks to reverse the direction they were facing.  When the street car got to the beach they didn't turn the car around, they just flipped the seat backs to face in the opposite direction. Right about the time they ripped out the street car tracks in the early 1950s, my cousin Donnie and I would often spend the afternoon counting automobiles.  The tracks were only 35 yards from where Donnie lived with his mom near the corner of Norwalk Ave and Eagle Rock Blvd.  We positioned ourselves behind the wall that separated his front yard from Dick & Hal's gas station on the corner.  The house and th...