Time Travail Read Online Free Page B

couldn’t find magnesium or aluminum
powder or delicate specialized glassware in garbage cans. The
chemicals and some of our equipment had to come from stores. I
operated mainly in winter when I could wear my billowing raglan
overcoat. It was fitted out inside with hooks for the bulkier
hookable items. In the deep pockets there were quantities of
handkerchiefs to serve as clink-muffling buffers between beakers,
test-tubes, coils, etc.
    The place was out in Long Island City.
There’s prescription three times over but I won’t give the name.
Harvey supplied diversion by purchasing trifles.
    Once I got caught. Harvey calmly paid for his
five test tubes and left without giving me a glance. I had to give
them my name. I remember my intense shame. Jewish boys didn’t
steal. My mother didn’t say this but it was all over her stricken
face for days. It was much worse than the belting I got from my
father. He cited my friend Harvey as an example of proper
conduct.
    Much later when the old relationship between
us was dead, this one aspect survived. He’d ring me up and dictate
the titles of expensive specialized books that I procured for him
in the same way from university bookstores. He was one of my
customers. Like the others he paid half price for the books.
     
    But most of our equipment was salvaged, not
swiped. Dangerously situated on the other side of the tracks was
the most gigantic junk-heap I’ve ever seen in my life. They don’t
make junk-heaps like that any more. I can see all those desirable
objects now: ancient electric motors with their precious intact
armatures, big-bellied jugs with bubbles frozen in the thick warped
green glass, battered five-gallon cans, old roller-skates, mines of
ball bearings.
    I’ve got to get out of it. But wait, just
this: there, very clearly, as though produced by the screen, I can
see the broken Singer sewing machine with the floral pattern of the
cast-iron foot-pedal and there, the quaint refrigerator of the 30’s
crowned by the honey-comb cooler, lying next to those two rusty
bicycle-frames.
    I’ve got to stop, get out of it. Details can
overwhelm you. It can be dangerous.
     
    Anyhow, Harvey would step carefully in the
chaos, inspect, step back to safety and tell me what to worry and
pry and wrench free. I came with a crowbar and an assortment of
screwdrivers, hammers, chisels and hacksaws. I became expert at it.
To transport the stuff we’d built a big wooden wagon with old
bicycle-wheels. We had our own junk-heap on Mr Morgenstern’s lot,
next to our shack.
    Harvey’s father owned a big lot close to his
old house. He always hoped the real-estate market would improve but
it wasn’t desirable property because of the nearby railroad tracks.
Already Harvey’s father was tempted with the idea of building a
bigger and better house for his family on it, which is what he
finally did in circumstances I won’t be able to avoid recalling. In
the meantime he let us build a shack on it for our experiments.
Harvey drew up the plans and I did the sawing and nailing.
     
    The trouble was, the big junk-heap was
located in enemy territory on the other side of the tracks, a
shantytown inhabited by Poles and Irish and Litvaks. From our shack
you could see them in their anti-Semitic patched jackets and
woollen stocking caps with battered pails picking up chunks of coal
that fell out of the freight cars. Nowadays that expression “live
on the other side of the tracks” doesn’t mean anything. It did
then. Chaplin, great comic embittered man, caught it all in certain
of his short silent films.
    The other side of the tracks everything was
lopsided and violent. There were slapped-together wooden houses
with sagging porches, ash-heaps, barrels of tadpole-infested
stagnant rainwater. I can see gray tattered wash flapping from
lines over poverty-stricken vegetables like cabbage and carrots.
Also yellowish dogs scouring among turds and broken bottles.
    I could go on forever. Not I but the