15 - hobby shop




Dave tells me he’s found a way that we can drive cars, even though we are still years too young to get our driver’s licenses.
This is a big mystery to me. So I’m willing to go along with him, even though he won’t tell me where we’re going or how we can make it happen.
He says he’ll show me.
So far I have managed to drive my uncle’s car twice – once even with permission that time he let me drive up and down the driveway, which only made me ache for more.
Our age is a torture – look but don’t touch – enough to turn anyone into a car thief, not that I need more than a little push in that direction, though that one night when I drove it out our driveway, and down Lakeview Avenue, and over the Parkway Bridge, and then to the on ramp behind School No. 11 to Route 46 made my uncle so angry (angrier even than the Fourth of July rocket) I know better than to try it again.
My uncle didn’t call the police on me that time. The cops caught me on their own, saying I looked too small behind the wheel, though I think my traveling down the highway at a hundred might have given me away.
When I ask Dave where we are going, he won’t tell me that either.
“You’ll see,” he says as we hop on our bicycles and head down the Lakeview Avenue hill towards Passaic – not to Passaic – down the way the Number 3 bus goes when it heads in that direction from my house on the top of the hill at Crooks Avenue, passed St. Brendan’s Church, the convent, the school yard playground that serves as a parking lot on Sunday,  passed Weiss’ Foodtown, and the real estate/insurance office, and then the Parkway overpass over which Dave and I got caught throwing matches although neither of us is sure which of us did it and so blamed each other, and then passed the gas station on the right on the corner of Fifth Street and the string of stores on the other side that changes what kind of store they are from month to month, once a fancy knickknack shop, then a fabric shop, but now empty with a sign in its window saying: for lease – with a corner bar on this side where Sixth Street intersects with Lakeview, while on the other side, there is the office of a contractor with a corner parking lot, and a fenced in area about that just as the street rises and just below the basement wall of the first house in on Sixth, where a large German shepherd runs from one side to the other, barking and growling, a beast nearly as old as I am, but still mean, still scaring me from the time when my best friend was Stephen and I had to turn there to climb that hill to go see him and the dog would lunge at the cyclone fence, jaws trying to work through the narrow opening to get at me.
I don’t know where we will find a car at the end of this unless we steal one, which I won’t, having learned from the cops the first time that the next time I’ll go to jail if I do.
Then I think this is an elaborate joke, only Dave’s not that funny, he only thinks he is, and he tells stupid jokes, nothing anywhere near as clever at this.
By the time we passed School No. 11 and the old German bakery my grandmother always sends me to in order to get the bread she remembers her mother baking back when they both lived over in the German section of Little Ferry as a young girl, then under the Route 46 overpass, I begin to think Dave may have lost his mind; we’re not liked down at this end of Lakeview Avenue, especially at the sweetshop a half block up from the overpass where the kids from the Junior High hang out. We even pass Old Doc Wallace’s place just beyond Piaget Avenue, convenient if any of the junior high kids catch us and we need Doc to fix us up afterwards.






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