Monday in July. I am at the fruit stand once more, enjoying the slow pace of things. It was a good weekend, filled with things. Mike came over on Friday, while Bill was in Manhattan working with the theatrical society he joined a few months ago.

He was performing in a few 10 minute plays about Baseball and wrote and directed one of them. Before that though, it was a different story. The night before I went to bed leaving Bill and Mike to talk about theater. Mike has an active interest and Bill has his tales to tell. They stayed up later than either one of them intended and I slept soundly.

The next morning was filled with rain. There was a plan, perhaps only in my head, where the three of us would head to the supermarket. It was a steady, heavy rain and Bill had his play to work on for that evening’s performance and Mike was helping him with his lines.

So I wound up going to the supermarket in the rain. The umbrella I had sufficed as I walked from the apartment to the cigar shop to the supermarket. Halfway to the supermarket I started to doubt my resolve to get groceries, but I knew I needed my provisions.

I puffed on a small cigar and crossed street corners that were slowly flooding. I got what I needed from the supermarket and 20 minutes later I was heading out only to face a few inches of water where only a few minutes earlier things were relatively OK.

It poured and poured and my usual route needed to be recalibrated. I thought I was lessening my exposure to the flooding but I was only kidding myself. I was merely a block or two from my apartment and my work boots were washed out.

About 3 inches of water on the sidewalk and about 6 inches off the curb which was where I needed to go. Once you were wet, there was nothing to do about it except to trudge on through. I rang the buzzer to my building and Bill buzzed me and Mike helped me out on the stairs to the apartment as I stepped out of my soggy work boots and left them in the hallway to dry.

Bill headed out after that and I was left hoping the performance would be canceled that night due to the rain. It wasn’t and Mike and I soon were on a bus headed to the evening’s performance. And it was very good. 8 10-minute plays about baseball.

Bill was in a few of them and also wrote and directed one of them. His first time for that. And it was impressive, not just Bill’s input but the whole evening of entertainment. Mike was moved to tears a few times. Overall we both liked the plays very much and found Bill’s fellow members to be very nice and welcoming.

A walk to the subway followed since it started to rain again. Mike was hungry and so we went to Benny’s where I had not had a slice of their pizza in quite a number of years. It was just as bland as I remembered and at $6.00 not worth it. But we were hungry and something needed to be done.

We got back to the apartment and ate the warm slices, I had 2 and Mike had one of two, saving the other for Sunday. Bill went to bed and I was there at midnight, past my bedtime. Sunday arrived and I did the bike ride again, this time to North Bergen for a change of pace.

It was a good ride, nothing exciting. Easy to avoid people and they were more receptive to my buzzing when I approached them. I rode back to Hoboken, stopping at an ATM for some cash. There was what could be described as a yuppie though I don’t think that word is in use these days.

He was having a problem getting in with his bank card and his frustration showed with each attempt. I told him to let me try and sure enough access was granted. I had my bike on the railing outside and in trying to remove it, sliced open the ring finger on my left hand.

It bled a lot despite my trying to stem the bleeding. Bill was at the matinee of the plays and Mike was home, somewhat distressed by the blood. He opened the very old bandaids and I applied them as we sat and watched Alias, a show that he used to watch back in the day. It was the first episode so he filled me in on who was who and what was what.

Bill was soon home and we watched Spain beat Argentina in the World Cup final. Mike was soon on his way home and Bill and I watched the Hannah Waddingham/Olivia Spencer show on Amazon, followed by episodes of Jeopardy that we missed.

I was soon asleep, dreaming of trying to sell issues of Playboy that my brother Frank used to own. There was a pawnbroker interested as well as my Rasta pal Jesse. It was an odd dream interrupted by a dehydration headache I had. I got out of bed, took 2 gelcaps and was fast asleep after that.

Summer afternoons, a Friday. It is my brother Brian’s birthday. He’s a good man. He was a pain in the ass growing up but now we are friends. It took a while to get to this point and here we are. Years ago, let’s say 50 years ago, it was different.

Life was good and easy and I had few responsibilities. And if I did have responsibilities I sometimes neglected doing them. Something as easy as putting away the butter from the morning, I just couldn’t get it done. Not out of malice, but more out of forgetfulness and distraction.

I remember a walloping from my mother for that exact offense. I didn’t know about money or how much a container of Breakstone’s Lightly Salted Butter was and how it maye have become rancid due to me. I have no idea if scenes like this played out in the homes of my friends but for me I was living in a different world.

I almost burned the house down due to idiocy. Teaching myself how to smoke cigarettes. I thought I would be smart and smoke in the dark, in the basement, sitting on top of dried out newspapers and putting out the cigarette on those very same papers which caused them to smolder.

That was one of the last straws, what will they do about John? Sometimes I was shipped out to friends of my parents. Sometimes they had kids my age, sometimes they didn’t. Marge Mudrack was a friend of my parents, a widow who sometimes hung out at the VFW.

She offered to take me in and so I was shipped off. She had a pool and it was summer but I really did not spend much time in the pool, though I would see my mother drive by since the HBJ book warehouse was quite near.

Mom wasn’t stopping by, she was going home to make dinner for her other children and my father. No time for me. There was nothing to do for me and if I was able, I would get some cash, some coins and buy comic books, but that rarely happened.

I was a handful and someone to worry about. My brother Brian was sometimes saddled with me, my mother telling him to keep an eye on me which he did with great resentment.

One summer Brian was working at HBJ and his friend Pete Frega was coaching a Summer League baseball team. Brian called me up from the warehouse payphone and asked if I wanted to play summer league baseball.

I of course said no to which Brian replied ‘Too bad, you’re gonna’. I could protest until I was blue in the face but the die was cast. I did not want to play baseball and never expressed any interest in doing so. That didn’t matter.

My mother might’ve watched one game and saw me strike out as I was swinging for the fences. Oh I hated it and tried to injure myself to get out of it. I had a baseball cap and a summer league t-shirt to go with my bruised nascent ego. I don’t think I lasted the baseball season which was just another thing in my life that was unfinished and incomplete.

The pattern was starting to form.