Jimmy rushed back to his store. Annabelle wasn’t there either. But a note had been slipped under the door. He unfolded the scrap of paper with trembling fingers.
Sorry, Jimmy. It was fun while it lasted. But all good things must come to an end. Think of me whenever you go to the food trucks. It’s time that I begin my second act.
The Gauntlet
by Jonathan Stone
Edgewood Avenue
In my junior year of college, I lived off campus with several roommates — Larry from Rye, New York, Roger from Brentwood, California, Bruce from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Lionel from Lincoln, Nebraska. We rented the basement apartment and the open-plan, skylighted second floor of a blue clapboard house whose first-floor apartment was occupied by Keneisha — a sometime prostitute and drug dealer — and her six-year-old son Marcus. (We bought dime bags from her — probably the only genuine convenience of off-campus living, as it turned out.) Keneisha wore a gold necklace with a gold phallus pendant, which nestled in permanent thrall deep in her cleavage. I got the sense that Keneisha at some point had put out the word to leave the Yale boys alone, but her word apparently went only so far. Because while we were never burglarized or attacked inside the house, on the walk from the house to campus we were, it seemed, fair game. Hell, we were more than fair game. We were sport.
This was Edgewood Avenue. Edgewood — accent on the second syllable for the proper local pronunciation. We’d say it like that in jest to each other — out of the locals’ earshot, of course. My Smith girlfriend was in France for the semester. So this was my semester abroad. My own cross-cultural experience.
Edgewood. Six blocks of anarchy in the shadow of Yale. At that time, New Haven, 1976, a lot of the blocks around Yale were seas of, and lessons in, anarchy. Say “New Haven, 1976” to Old Blues of a certain vintage and we shake our heads in mournful recognition. Just the name of the city coupled to the year calls up tensions, hostility, urban America at its worst.
Our Edgewood education started even before the semester officially began. The windshield of my Volvo was smashed on our first night in the house, when I left the car out after moving my stuff in.
Oh, you have to garage it.
Our shiny bikes — stolen from right off the front porch.
Oh, you have to bring them inside with you.
Our dreams of a little freedom from the constraints of Yale. A little liberation for five boys who had followed all the rules all their lives to get here. Looking for a little independence, a little adventure, a modest little divergence from the constrictions of academia and convention and expectation.
Oh, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
As fate would have it, for the galloping hormones of a nineteen-year-old Yalie, my basement bedroom was contiguous to where Keneisha “partied” with her gentleman callers, and the thumping of music — KC and the Sunshine Band, “That’s the Way (I Like It)”; Ohio Players, “Love Rollercoaster”; Vicki Sue Robinson, “Turn the Beat Around”; Donna Summer, “Love to Love You Baby” — drowned out whatever other audible accompaniment there might be, though the music did not purge it from my imagination.
My bedroom had a sliding door onto a small junk-cluttered backyard. Metal bars held the slider closed, but I would hear the door jiggle occasionally while I was working at my desk. That’s when I would grab the five iron I slept with under my bed.
A five iron. The comfort of its familiar shaft in my hand. That should tell you a lot about Yalies on Edgewood: a five iron for protection.
I did not stroll down Edgewood with a five iron, though. I walked only in daylight. One walk to campus in the morning, one walk back before dark. There was no consistent theme or look to those six blocks — a tiny Ukrainian bakery, a locksmith, a few empty storefronts, some residential “projects” whose crazy pink, purple, and tangerine pastel doors were comically bright spots — some developer’s idea for a little accent of cheerfulness — that only highlighted the slapdash, thoughtless, halfhearted attempt to dress up the drab brown brick around them. And even those doors were quickly faded and besieged by graffiti.
In New Haven in 1976, it was essentially running a gauntlet, walking those six blocks. Day was risky. Night was lawless.
I walked focused, intent, staying alert, watching around me every step, probably not a good target. If I was going to a party on campus, I’d stay in a friend’s room. I lived my life around timing the Edgewood walk right.
Lionel Patton did not. Lionel ambled, strolled, looked around casually, curiously, taking it all in.
Lionel, from Lincoln, Nebraska. Big-boned, loose-limbed, ambling down the sidewalk oblivious — a creamy-skinned, bright-eyed, howdy-there-how-ya-doin’ friendly Midwesterner. Black-framed glasses on an open face. Big, outgoing, cheerful. Carrying his French horn everywhere. It was practically attached to him, and he was here because of it. Recruited by all the Ivies for his French horn prowess.
The world had always been his oyster, you could tell. His family were rich corn and soybean farmers. Farmers with thousands of acres. The kind of farmers who took frequent trips to Europe and the Far East. Life an ongoing project in growth and learning.
He was the kind of Yalie who comes east to school and maybe finds a pretty wife (prime breeding stock), and after graduation heads to Europe for more cultural education, maybe finds a European wife instead, returns to the Midwest eventually to take over the family holdings and tend them for the next generation. Lionel let drop once that his family had loaned some money to a bright young fellow, name of Warren Buffett, and had gotten some stock shares in return. In short, the kind of Yalie you can’t make up. And I’m sure that when he told his folks, I’m going to live off campus, Ma and Pa, they had a certain bon-vivant vision of it that did not match the reality of New Haven, 1976.
Lionel was, in short, a target.
Might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on his French horn case.
Although they never took the French horn. They didn’t want a French horn. They didn’t even know what a French horn was. They wanted his wallet. They wanted his new sneakers. They wanted his suede jacket.
It was a certain group of kids. I’d seen them, and managed to avoid them. They swarmed out of nowhere on their bikes, in their hooded sweatshirts, yelling and laughing and posturing for each other, intimidating girls and the elderly, and then disappearing into the housing projects or alleys just as quickly. Street guerrillas. A gang in its formative stage. A project for some enterprising Yale anthropology major with a suicide wish.
Lionel, unlike the rest of us, insisted on reporting it every time. That was the proper thing to do. So the weary cops would come out, hold their pads in front of them, and dutifully take down the information, looking at Lionel like he was from another planet, which he clearly was.
Beyond the insult of being intimidated by skinny, arrogant, undernourished fifteen-year-olds, privileged Yalies could of course absorb the forfeiture of a few material goods. Part of me thinks those little Edgewood hoodlums knew that, and it peeved them to see Lionel with new sneakers and a nice new jacket a few days later, and that’s why they upped their game.
And in a way, this is where this story really begins: