In the 8th and 9th grades I used to hang out with my friends at the local mall, smoking cigarettes, swearing, and being a general public nuisance. We were punks.
There was a dry cleaners in one corner of the mall where we could gather and smoke free of adult reprobation. A woman named Miriam managed the store and she had a part-time helper, a 20-year-old college student named Kate. Kate was an additional reason to hang out there, just like these pressed suits and shirts are hanging. You could bum cigarettes off of Kate. She always kept a pack of Marlboros by the register.
I'm not sure why Miriam and Kate tolerated a gang of teenage boys. We smoked and pushed and slapped each other, and briefly we pitched pennies in front of the store, which the ladies put an end to, and often when a customer entered the store we were asked politely to leave. I guess when there weren't any customers, Miriam and Kate were bored so our presence might have provided some diversion until they lost patience and we moved on.
One day Mrs. Rand entered the store to drop off some dry cleaning. She didn't recognize me, and I doubted she would have recognized me, or at the least she didn't acknowledge me, which was different than seeing her next door. Miriam waited on Mrs. Rand and after Mrs. Rand had left, I asked Miriam if she knew Mrs. Rand.
"A very nice woman," Miriam said.
"Nice?" I proceeded to run down a list of what I perceived had been Mrs. Rand's atrocities, including the story of the baseball and other scoldings, and the general coldness for a neighbor. Miriam seemed unfazed.
"Well, I only know her as a regular customer," she said. "and she has always been extremely polite and generous, and we talk and we're on friendly terms."
Miriam's husband, Francis, sometimes visited. He was a fastidiously dressed dapper man with a pencil thin mustache, not unlike Mrs. Rand's husband. Miriam's husband Francis wore homburgs and drove an elegant car and for some reason he enjoyed seeing me and my friends maybe because they didn't have children of their own. Miriam would suggest that we sit in the car with Francis, and after chatting a few minutes, Francis would say, "I have an errand for you boys." "Sure" "You know Johnny D'Amato at the bowling alley?" "Sure," we would say. At the opposite end of the mall was a bowling alley and pool hall and Johnny was manager. We would often clean lanes and score sheets for him, and empty ashtrays, and Johnny would let us play some games of pool even though we were underage. Francis took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote some numbers down on the slip of paper. "Here," he said "when you head over to the bowling alley, give this to Johnny." "Sure," my friends and I said, "we'll go right away." and I think Francis may have said something about us being good kids but it wasn't particularly relevant.
Johnny D'Amato seemed a little annoyed when we entered the bowling alley. Apparently someone was there to investigate underage kids in the billiards room. In fact, you weren't supposed to be in the billiard room watching older guys play (and I should add these players were almost right out of "The Hustler"). So playing pool was out for the moment, but when we handed Johnny the paper from Francis his face lit up and he pretended that we knew what the paper was all about even though we didn't. Then, before he stepped away, he told us we could have a free game of bowling.
So the punks were running numbers, or we were perhaps one link in the chain. Perhaps Johnny was going to bring the slip of paper somewhere else or make a phone call. This was the mid-sixties, and even though the numbers game was a fairly innocuous activity, it was still managed by organized crime. There was no legalized gambling in the United States except in Las Vegas, and state-run lotteries were still a few years away. It almost seems quaint from this vantage think of picking daily numbers as being illegal, but then 30-40 years earlier drinking alcohol was illegal throughout the nation, and there are still vestiges of those laws today in dry towns and dry counties.
Francis was older and a nice man and Miriam's husband. We were just saving him a little leg work. No one seemed to mind.
