I felt quite proud that Joe, the miracle worker, he who could feather a pump’s water pressure just enough to give us the most beautiful fire-hydrant creations ever, lived in our building. For the most part, though, and this is a side of Joe that tends to be overlooked, he spent his waking hours drunk or high. He would have loud parties that ended up in fistfights at 3 a.m., people falling down our three-flat’s stairs, creative insults being slung in the stairwell, bottles being thrown on the front sidewalk. Delia and I were often awoken by Joe’s scuffles, and we would look out our front window to see Joe out there either pounding on or being pounded by some similar-looking heavyweight. My father would call the cops (if Betty downstairs hadn’t already) and things would be settled. Joe would crawl back upstairs, we would crawl back into bed, and all would be forgotten. It was routine. Joe gets loud, someone calls the cops, Joe apologizes with a sincere, smiling face to my mother and Betty the next day.
At times, when summer was in full swing and the pump contests were unofficially under way, the block just down from us, just across Nineteenth Street, would try and outdo us with its own fans of water. It occurs to me now that we really had no name for these fans of water. All one had to say was “Man, look at that one,” and it was obvious to all those listening that another oasis had been spotted, another reprieve in our neighborhood’s desert of concrete. To stand beneath one of these great formations, within its massive dome of water, was to be in a completely different world, secluded, excluded, soundless except for the roar of the rushing water. Even the kids standing right next to you could not be heard, though you could see that their mouths were moving, that they were screaming just like you. The test was to see who could stand to be beneath the dome the longest. And then, upon exiting, the most excruciating task of all was to become real again. You would run to someone, the first person you saw, and start bragging about how great it was to have been beneath the dome so long. Or, if you were younger, as I was, you would run full speed to your mother, and act as if you had just performed some great feat of courage, some act beyond human comprehension, like the scaling of a monstrously high chain-link fence, the rescue of a baseball from a dog-infested yard, anything to get a reaction, a confirmation that you were there, that people could hear you and that you could hear them. At any one time during those summers, there were hordes of lost individuals, newly escaped from the great domes of water, running around frantic, trying to reestablish some sense of being in the real world.
From where our pump was, the kids down the block looked like miniature figurines, pet people running about, yapping, like windup toys. They were our block’s biggest rivals, and they had their own Joe, a fat man who would walk out with a pump key and turn up their water pressure whenever dominance needed to be established. Often, their routine, their unspoken challenge, was to turn up the pressure of their pump and wait for a response from us. Then Joe would come out, determined, nonchalant with confidence, and the domes of water would begin to rise in battle. Their group would cheer when theirs got higher. We would cheer when Joe got ours higher. The valves would screech; within our cracked sidewalk the pipes would moan like the hull of a sinking ship. We would cringe at every turn of Joe’s wrench. Inevitably, at least from what I remember, Joe would feather out just enough water pressure so that we never reached our breaking point — the point at which our board snapped in half and shot out across the street with enough speed to kill someone. But just in case, when our battles with the next block began, everyone left the area of water flow and fell in behind Joe, where we could cheer in safety.
We always won. The block down from us had a history of shoddy pump construction. The minute theirs would give, they would all yell in disappointment. Sometimes a little voice could be heard echoing down the block—“Next time, assholes, we’ll get you next time.” And they would set to building their dome up once again — runners sent off in search of new boards, water pressure inched back up to a respectable level. Joe would accept congratulations, restore our pump’s normal flow, and everything would resume, things would go back to normaclass="underline" kids running in and out of the water, experiencing sudden losses upon entering and desperate struggles upon exiting.
There was a layer of grit settled at the bottom of May Street’s gutters, and possibly, this is what sparked the idea to start panning. Maybe, at some point, one of us had scooped up a handful of this grit and suddenly discovered diamonds and precious minerals. Maybe one of us had looked at the other with the astonished face of a scientist who has just made an inadvertent discovery — a face of excitement — a face filled with the feelings one tries to quell by saying, “Wait a minute. I need to try this again.” And maybe we did try again, and came up with more jewels and riches, and soon this prompted us to start panning, like early Californians — ghetto forty-niners.
At first we must’ve looked like fools, Delia and I, leaning over the curb, sifting through the heavy till of the gutters. But soon we became pioneers, and it was not long before the other kids of our block began prospecting as welclass="underline" Little Joey from the apartment building next door and his sister, Genie; Mario León, the son of the corner grocer; and even Peety, the eight-year-old pool-shark, whose father owned the corner tavern. I seem to remember Delia saying to me once, “They’re taking all our gold,” but I am not sure if this is actual memory. Though this seems like something my sister would have said (she was the more enterprising of the two of us), it seems also that Delia and I almost never spoke while we did our panning; rather, we just squatted there, elbows between our knees, hands turning over and over, primed to pluck our riches.
Gold was, of course, the most sought-after of the precious commodities we panned for. But often we found diamonds and silver as well. Delia, when she would come across those rare green diamonds (shattered pieces of a 7UP bottle), or those blue ones (who knows what these were from), would hold them up to the sunlight and squint like a jeweler; then she would plunk them in the appropriately labeled coffee can and grunt, as if saying to herself, Damn, now that was a good one. I, on the other hand, often skipped over the diamonds, and instead focused in on the gold — those gold-colored 7UP bottle caps, preferably the ones with the red 7UP insignia still visible on them. But Delia, glitter queen that she was, went for the diamonds, the glass, and always had Band-Aids on her fingers because of it. This became a precautionary measure for her after a time, and I am sure that if my mother had ever found out what was happening to all the Band-Aids, she would have forbade us from ever prospecting again. As it was, though, my mother had no idea, and Delia would wrap her fingers and dig in, pulling up colored glass, holding it to the sunlight, and occasionally looking over at me with the sparkle in her eyes that I came to understand as my sister daydreaming about what she would do with our fortune.