A songwriter moves to Trinity Street, where the kids have no playground but sing and play through the day. The songwriter has lost his muse, and he can’t remember the last time he dreamed all the colors or dreamed he could fly. It’s also been a long time since there was somebody or something special in his house. When he hears the Trinity Kids singing about balloons, being a messy little girl, a flower girl, or a frog, he gets ideas for the Balloon Master, Golden Girl Soap Powder, Flowershack, and Frogstore radio jingles. Mrs. Strange, an old lady who lives up in the apartment building and listens to the radio all day so loud you can hear it down on the street, takes a break from yelling at the kids and tells them that the songwriter stole their songs. The kids get mad at the songwriter, who they thought was their friend, and pelt his house with rotten eggs. Later, they find out he’s convinced the city to turn an abandoned lot into a playground for them and paid for it with the jingle money. They realize maybe they were too hard on the songwriter and ask him to be their friend again.
Part 1
We called him “Speedy” from that first day he moved into old Mrs. Bunton’s house on Trinity Street. Maybe it was the speedy way he drove that little rented moving truck down the block, brought it to a quick stop, hopped out, and got right to work bringing boxes up onto Mrs. Bunton’s porch. Or maybe it was because of his bullet-shaped head and his thick coke-bottle glasses. Or the funny way that he sputtered out his words when he talked to us that summer morning.
There we were when he arrived, all nine of us Trinity kids sitting right there on Mrs. Bunton’s porch, which was Speedy’s porch now, making ourselves at home. You see, our parents didn’t have the dough to send us away to a fancy camp over the summer, and we had pretty much made a summer clubhouse out of Mrs. Bunton’s porch since she’d passed away. I suppose most people wouldn’t have been too thrilled to find a bunch of dirty-necked kids hanging out around their door. And we must have made quite a sight in our grungy t-shirts, dungarees, and sneakers. All shapes and sizes we were. All colors from pink to coffee to ebony, tan, and in between. Even one tough little girl, Maggie, who was a tomboy and hung out with us. But Speedy didn’t seem to mind.
As I remember it, we were cooling off after a stickball game is what we were doing. Snacking on BBQ potato chips, lemonheads, now-laters, sodas, and whatever else we could get our hands on at the corner Mom and Pop’s. I suppose Speedy looked a little uncertain what we were doing there. Maybe a little bit confused by all the shouting, yelling, and cursing about “hunks” and “no hunks”— our way of arguing about whether somebody could get a bite of somebody else’s food or a slug of their soda.
Anyway, it looked like poor Speedy didn’t have a single friend to help him with his move and we started right in asking him, “Hey, Mister, you gonna carry all those yourself? Ain’t you got any friends to help you?”
“Nah, nobody could make it today,” Speedy said, sheepishly.
That’s when Fonzo Jones spoke up in his sing-song voice, “Hey, man, we’ll help you, just one quarter each, that’s all.” Fonzo was from Barbados and talked different from the rest of us. He laughed different, too. He had a big rubbery laugh that bounced right up from deep in his belly and could bust out just about any time. Sometimes he was hard to understand, but I think Speedy got the idea.
So, we cut a deal with Speedy to carry his boxes and furniture and stuff into his house for a quarter each. Now, I know a quarter doesn’t sound like much today, but back then, a quarter bought you a lot of candy or maybe a toy plane or a parachute soldier that you could toss down from your window or something. To give you an idea, in those days, penny candy was still a penny, a Frank’s black cherry wishniak soda was maybe 15 cents and a bag of corn chips the same. Even 5 cents got you a big old Charms lolly pop or a candy stick.
With visions of what we would buy with our 25 cents dancing in our heads, we made short work of bringing Speedy’s boxes and furniture inside, and somewhere along the line we got to talking to him some. He told us his real name, which was Michael Burlingwood, and we introduced ourselves, too—Jeff, Andy, Fonzo, Pompey, Steven, Maggie, Billy, Scotty, and me. We asked him if he owned the house now, but he said that he was just renting it. Most important to us, though, he didn’t chase us off the porch when all the moving was done. He just paid us our quarters, climbed up real speedy-like into that little truck and sped away to return it.
For the next couple of days we made jokes here and there about Speedy. In fact, we joked a lot about him. Not just about his bullet-shaped head and coke-bottle glasses, but also about his highwater pants, ankle-choker socks, and bobo sneakers. And the way he talked. And walked. And the way he looked at you, a little bit cross-eyed.
I’ll tell you though, all that changed on that magical Saturday afternoon when Speedy’s piano arrived. Magic, I say, because it’s a wondrous sight for a kid to see three brawny men hoisting a grand piano with thick ropes up to an upstairs window on a pulley. Man, it was just dangling way up there in the sun, heavy and dangerous, casting big black shadows on us little guys below. We oohed and aahed as it was guided with some difficulty through the big upstairs windows and safely inside, the movers shouting out directions to each other like big burly guys did.
All was quiet for the rest of the morning—all except for us Trinity Kids making our usual racket out on the street—singing, dancing, arguing, and laughing about just about anything. I remember we were chasing Pompey Fowlkes around, trying to score punches on him because we were playing “manners” that morning and Pompey had made the mistake of cursing. The rule was that the person who cursed got punched until he named 20 cigarette brands and though that could take a while to get out when you were getting punched, Pompey was the fastest kid on the block and he was hard to catch.
Well, just as Pompey was about halfway through his list... heaving out the words “Camel, Pall Mall, Benson and Hedges,” the first lovely, round, and bell-like notes floated out from Speedy’s house onto Trinity Street...
TO BE CONTINUED
