Page 77 - WhyAsInY

1771 oCean (anD M)
by the narrow driveway that was referred to as “the alley” (which led to our fully detached one-car garage), had a dentist’s office at ground level and some residential apartments upstairs. More important, that building housed our grocery store, Churgin’s, which, until it became a Key Food in the mid-fifties, was owned by the two unhappy Churgin brothers, one of whom would consistently refer to customers who did not please him as, “Galitzianas.” I subsequently learned that that imprecation referred to Jews from Galicia (not the Spanish Galicia but the Galicia of either Hungary or the Ukraine), who were apparently considered quite infe- rior to the Jews from whatever region in Eastern Europe had brought forth the Churgin clan, who were, in any event, probably the Churgin- skys. I had been told that the same Churgin brother had asked my father for a bunch of his business cards when our family first moved into 1771. Thereafter, to my father’s horror, those cards started showing up in all the shopping bags that managed to escape from Churgin’s.
A liquor store had the southeast corner. It was of no importance to me as I grew up, but immediately to its east were two shops on Avenue M that were. The first was Vito’s Barbershop, where I believe I had every one of my haircuts until I left Brooklyn for college in 1961. When I was a little boy, my father would tell Vito how he thought my hair should look; by the time that I was twelve, I was dictating the style: a flattop crew cut speedily accomplished with electric clippers (therefore, a “buzz cut”). Then there was a variant of the flattop as I got a bit older, which was called, for reasons that escape me, a “Detroit.” It was a crew cut with the sides kept long and swept back. Even when the crew cut’s top grew out, the hair was still swept back to meet at a ridge in the back. That style, reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s hairdo, was referred to as a “ducktail” haircut or a “DA,” both of which names were polite formula- tions of the words for which DA stood. Finally, my hair went back to normal length and lost the DA in high school, when it was held in place, as it had been in junior high, by a variety of tonics and pomades (Bryl- creem being the most memorable brand—before Vitalis, that is), all of which contributed to the “greasy kid stuff ” look, which I didn’t lose until, probably, college.
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