Page 85 - WhyAsInY

1771 oCean (anD M)
which was unique in the neighborhood, where the normal lot measured forty by one hundred feet. The front had a brick facade on the ground floor level, and it had a path to a central entrance, leading to my father’s new spacious and sunny office, which filled the entire first floor. The southern side of the house had an entrance to our living quarters. We lived on the second floor, but we also had both a basement (unfinished) and an attic, which held the washer and dryer and, ultimately more important to the teenage me, my bedroom. The living room and my parents’ bedroom were to the front and faced onto a balcony that ran the length of the house and could be accessed through the living room. There was also a formal dining room adjacent to a newer and nicer kitchen and what we came to call the family room, which held book- cases, couches, and a TV with a twenty-one-inch screen. The family room was at first my bedroom, but it became a common area when I departed for the privacy of the attic.
East 23rd Street was considered to be a relatively prestigious place to live. (My friend Larry Itkin, whose father was thought to have become wealthy through the ownership of Itkin Brothers Office Furniture, a large store in Manhattan, lived there, at least until his family became rich enough to build a house in Scarsdale, which was someplace far away in Westchester County.)
I recall that my parents acquired 975 for $32,500. When I somehow learned that (money was never discussed in front of me, except to dock my allowance or to say that I was spending too much of it), I thought, for the first time, that my father was doing very well, and, in any event, much better than our next-door neighbors on Ocean Avenue, Oscar and Gert Levy and their son, and my sometime playmate, Sandy. (I shall always remember Gert Levy as the bleached-blond neighbor who slapped me in the face for refusing some order of hers and saying, “Go blow your jets, Jetson Bobbleneck,” a line that I had learned from watch- ing Captain Video.) I had once entered the Levys’ kitchen and seen stacks and stacks of quarters on the dinette table, far more money, I concluded, than my father ever made. Moreover, Sandy always seemed to have many more toys than I had. It was later explained to me that Oscar Levy’s
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