Belt Parkway.]

AND BROOKLYN

You can't really stay sore at a guy you've known all your life, especially
if he lives right around the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow,
one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up at my house as if nothing had ever
happened and says do I want to go swimming, because the Twenty-third
Street pool's open weekends now.

After that we go back to playing ball on the street in the evenings and
swimming sometimes on weekends. One Saturday his mother tells me he went
to Coney Island. He didn't ask me to go along, which is just as well,
because I wouldn't have. I don't hang around his house after school much
anymore, either. School lets out, and there's the Fourth of July weekend,
when we go up to Connecticut, and pretty soon after that Nick goes off to
a camp his church runs. Pop asks me if I want to go to a camp a few weeks,
but I don't. Life is pretty slow at home, but I don't feel like all that
organization.

I think Tom must have forgotten about me and found a gang his own age when
I get a postcard from him: "Dear Dave, The guy I work for is a creep, and
all the guys who buy gas from him are creeps, so it's great to be alive in
Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but you're lucky you're not. Best,
Tom."

It's hard to figure what he means when he says a thing. However, I got
nothing to do, so I might as well go see. He said he was going to work in
a filling station on the Belt Parkway, and there can't be a million of
them.

I don't say anything too exact to Mom about where I'm going, because she
gets worried about me going too far, and besides I don't really know where
I'm going.

Brooklyn, what a layout. It's not like Manhattan, which runs pretty
regularly north and south, with decent square blocks. You could lose a
million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets all running in circles and
angles, and the people all giving you cockeyed directions. What with no
bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting around crumby looking
neighborhoods, it takes me at least a week of expeditions to find the
right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking the filling stations.

I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even so some cop yells at me.
You'd think a cop could find a crime to get busy with.

On a real sticky day in July I wheel across to a station at Thirty-fourth
Street, and nobody yells at me, and I go over to th