Just Kids From the Bronx (29 page)

BOBBY BONILLA

Professional baseball player

(1963– )

As a kid, I knew that I excelled at playing certain sports, like baseball, but I had just as much fun playing basketball. I had just as much fun playing football in the snow and I had just as much fun playing roller hockey, which was my favorite. It was such a blast. My friends and I, we shared our interests in sports and played all year round. If it snowed, we put Baggies over our feet because otherwise our socks would get wet. My mother is a psychologist and wasn’t big on sports. She just made sure that I was home before the streetlights came on. I never heard those words “Stay in the house.” It was, “Be home before the lights come on.” Now things are so different. Everything today is a playdate. Like, “What time should we meet on Thursday?” Really? Everything we did, we did on our own.

I never had the sense that we lived in small apartments. That’s how everybody lived. I didn’t have to worry about the “Joneses” because everybody in my neighborhood was the same as everyone else. We were all in the same situation. I had friends who had houses, and we had an apartment. I’m not going to say it was as luxurious as some of the apartments in the city, but it was home. This is something I can share with my kids now. “Why do you think you’re cramped? Why are you complaining about being cramped?” We were four kids in our apartment. Two sisters and two boys. Fraternal twins and my little brother.

My dad was an electrician and would do little things to motivate me. For instance, I never really had jobs as a kid, but sometimes I would go to work with him and do odd jobs with him. We were somewhere in the South Bronx and the buildings needed an electrician because the wires were frayed. He’d diagnose a problem and try to find the live feeds and the negative feeds. So he’s on the ladder, you know, and suddenly he gets shocked. He falls down from the ladder and doesn’t say anything to me. He’s okay and he climbs back up the ladder, finishes the job, and looks down at me and says, “Is this what you want to do for a living?”

He was telling me to go after what I believed I wanted for myself, but to also finish the job first. I couldn’t ask for more than that, especially because my mom wanted me to go into the medical field. At the time I guess they were looking for male nurses and stuff like that. She was pushing me in that direction. They needed big guys to pull the gurneys around, and if anybody got unruly they needed someone stronger to hold them. But my dad would give me little words of encouragement, like he did on the ladder. I probably would’ve followed in his footsteps, but he wanted me to do my own thing. Me—
I like this baseball stuff
.

As I said, my friends and I, we were sports nuts. One time eight of us were gathered together at eight-thirty in the morning because we were going to another neighborhood for a basketball game in a gym there. There was this bizarre moment.
What the hell is going on?
This guy was chasing another guy with a pistol in his hand. It was a blur and we all just stood there in amazement. He was running after this guy and he missed on every shot. It was a shock to see something like that but it didn’t deter us from our game.

Little League kept me busy. Which is not to say that other kids didn’t have arts and music, but I didn’t. Would it have been ideal if someone introduced me to art or something like that? Yeah, it would’ve been great. I play golf now, and say I wish that someone would’ve gotten that glove into my hand sooner. I just say that ’cause I’d be a better golfer, but I don’t think it would’ve changed anything. Maybe one thing I wished I would’ve gotten into my hand—but it’s more of a wish than something real—was an instrument. To play an instrument, that would’ve been a cool thing to do. To play the drums or a six-string guitar or something is a good way to unwind when you have a stressful day, instead of going to bars with your buddies. That can’t lead to anything good. But would I change? Absolutely not.

I had such a love for my dad, it’s indescribable. He died at sixty-three almost ten years ago. It was a big loss. My parents got divorced when I was very young but you’d never know that my parents were divorced because I saw my dad every day.

As things started to happen for me, he had an interesting take on fame. I was playing in a game in Boston, in Fenway Park, and he said after the game, “Listen, I don’t want you taking this shit too seriously.” “What’s wrong, Dad?” He says, “They’re all booing you and everything”—I was not on the home team—“but you know what? I want to see you smiling a bit when you’re out in the field. You’re getting a chance to do what you wanna do, which is phenomenal. Not many people can say that. You’re actually doing what you love to do. I wanna see you smiling. You should show people how much you appreciate what you have.” He played such a big part in my life. He was truly a wonderful man with a great take on things.

SOTERO (“BG 183”) ORTIZ

(1963– )

WILFREDO (“BIO”) FELICIANO

(1966– )

HECTOR (“NICER”) NAZARIO

(1967– )

Members of Tats Cru, graffiti artists

N
icer
: In my family, I’m the first generation born here in the United States. That’s how I’m from the Bronx. My family came over from Puerto Rico. My mother came over when she was fourteen in 1950-something. They didn’t speak much English, so when I was learning English, like in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, my mother and other relatives hovered over my homework books. They were learning English as I was learning it. So it was, like, a group session.

We didn’t think we were poor because we had everything we needed right there on the block. You had your friends, you had your family. I also had grandparents who lived two blocks over. And I had great-aunts and great-uncles there too. Doors were never locked. I would go over to a neighbor’s house and open the front door and say, “Is José here?” Every tenement building was like its own little community. A little city within a city.

My mother also went to school to learn English. You know, she always struggled with having that real strong accent. It was very funny. It took me many years to figure out that the Yankees didn’t start with a
J
.

BG 183
: I remember lunch hour when I was in second and third grade. Everybody was fighting. The teacher had no control over the kids. Kids just kicking and girls getting their hair pulled. It was like chaos. During that time you had the era of the karate movies so everyone’s trying to kick, trying to imitate Bruce Lee. It was a real crazy time. But at the same time, you know, I enjoyed it. It was my exercise for the day.

Bio
: We all grew up in different areas. I grew up in the Bronx River projects on 174th Street. We’d play mostly in the buildings. We’d go to the top of the elevators and jump from one elevator to the other elevator.

We were just kids. We’re running free in the streets. So we would get creative, and these were our games. As one elevator was passing, we would jump from one to the other.

What you would do is, as soon as the elevator would pass a floor going down, you could see it through this little window on the door. You would jimmy the door and it would automatically stop, once that door was opened. And then you’d be able to get on top. When the door closes it begins to move again. Remember we had nothing but time, so we played in the building.

Nicer
: We had to be more creative from having less available to us.

Bio
: We’d get off the same way. As the elevator was passing by the door, there’s a little latch you could push, and the door would open from the inside. But there were some of them where you would get shocked. Like if you touched the wrong spot, you’d get like a small shock. Those were part of our games.

I once also fell out of a window, playing in an abandoned building. I was on the second floor when I grabbed a window. The window gave way but the garbage below was piled up so high, when I landed, that’s what saved me. That was just part of the day. Playing in abandoned buildings is what everyone did. I used to come home …

BG 183
: With a nail through the sneakers!

Nicer
: Yeah. Nail through your sneakers. ’Cause we had either PF Flyers or a pair of Pro-Keds, and the rubber soles would wear out. If you had a hole, you’d put a piece of cardboard in there. But the thing was, everyone always stepped on nails. There were always these abandoned buildings, so you’d step on pieces of wood with nails that were rusted.

Bio
: We never went to get any tetanus shots. We had the ghetto treatment. Your mother would put some purple stuff on you, and she’d be like, “You’ll be okay. if you just stop jumping in the buildings.”

Nicer
: Or she’d wash it and put alcohol on it.

BG 183
: My mom had this remedy from Puerto Rico. After stabbing myself a couple of times with rusty nails, I already knew what to do. My mom said the first thing to do is to take out the blood. Start squeezing the blood out. Then I’d go home and my mom would put garlic on the wound and then a Band-Aid. That was the only remedy she had.

Abandoned buildings were like our playgrounds. You got to remember, this is what it boils down to. You’re born with this creative energy of wanting to play. We used creativity back then as opposed to the kids nowadays. We would find stuff and make things.

Nicer
: You’d find a round rock that was smooth enough that you can create a game with it. You get as creative as you can because of the things that are set around. That’s why they were able to invent, like, jumping up on the elevators.

We saw a lot of families displaced during the times when the buildings burned. All of a sudden when the building went they were gone.

BG 183
: There was a time that the building I was living in actually started burning. But a lot of people didn’t move out because we still had lights that worked. The only thing, in the winter, you didn’t have oil. There was no landlord to take care of things, so because there were lights you could live there for a while. Just in the wintertime you suffered. My mom would put up the stove every night. We slept in one room because it was much warmer to stay together as one unit. But for me, it was like, “Hey, it’s cold!”

But at night I would see these abandoned buildings burning, burning, burning. That was my entertainment of the night. Then, the next day, you’d hear like five firefighters got hurt and two got killed, but I didn’t know what was really going on. For me, it was like, “Look at this fire.”

Nicer
: Probably it was the late seventies, we would be moving a lot. A few years later, I asked my mother, once I became an adult, “Why did we move so much?” She said, “Because after a while once the landlords would disappear and no one was putting heat in the building and there was no one for us to pay rent to, then there was panic in the building.” We had family in the neighborhood and they would be like, listen, come over here and we’ll get you an apartment.

When there weren’t landlords, there was panic. Like, since the landlord stopped coming around to get the rent, that means this building might be next to burn. So let’s prepare ourselves. Let’s get out of here. There was a lot going on, but as kids we didn’t worry. As a parent you always make it safe for your kids, provide the best shelter you can for them.

We lived in the Bronx all our lives, except for probably about eight months. My mother finally got a nice gig in some office downtown, big raise, starting to manage an office. “I’m going to move out of the Bronx and bring my kids to a safer neighborhood. I’m moving to Jamaica, Queens.” So we move out of the Bronx. I’m like, “Out of the Bronx? Are you crazy?! Our grandmother’s here. Our other relatives are here.”

We were going to move to a better neighborhood, where there were trees. It was like what you see on TV, nice little houses with trees. So I finished out that first year in the Queens junior high school, like in seventh grade or something, and six months into living there they break into our apartment. They rob all the money we had for our rent, our bills, like the television. They rob us! I come home from school and I see my door in half, ’cause they kicked our door in. Right after that, around eight months after we got there, we were back on the train moving back to the Bronx. Coming back to where it was safer. It was funny, ’cause I remember going to school in Queens and people were like, “Where you guys from before?”