Nash Park (from Villains of the Gallows Tree)

Even in daylight, this place ain’t save.

When I tell Dave that, he tells me if I stop pissing off kids bigger than me, it would be.

I tell him I can’t be anybody but me.

So, we ride slow, and watchful, to keep anybody from sneaking up on us.

Most of the kids that hang out here have cars, parking them across Lexington Avenue at the Hot Grill, showing off for the high school girls who go there for gravy fries and to let the bigger boys see them.

Dave comes to this place more than I do and tells me it’s his favorite park, which explains why he drags me here as much as he does when we have other parks, I find more interesting.

This used to be my favorite park, too, when I was very young, before I met Dave or had many friends, my mother bringing me here to dip my toes in the wading pool and run through its fountain on very hot days.

I could barely walk then but I ran fine. I guess I needed the practice for when I grew up.

These days, the pool is grungy, the fountain barely trickles, and the pain peals. A few kids play in it, but most mons won’t let their kids anywhere near where the water looks green.

Dave likes the chili dogs the Hot Grill serves. He’s just too shy to go over and order any. The older boys pick on him and the girls who like the older boys always laugh.

Since I’m sort of hungry and like Chili dogs, too, we head over there on our bikes, even though it’s dangerous. I don’t mind the girls laughing. They’re too silly for me to care about. There are better and prettier girls up at the Clifton pool.

We both order chili dogs and eat them too quick. Dave hates the girls who giggle at him and I'm a bit nervous with the looks some of the boys give us as they try to figure out who I am and remember what exactly I did to them to make them mad last time they saw me.

I tried to ignore them and the girls, staring out the window at the street and the park beyond, and at the playground with its squat brick building with rusted men's and women's bathroom signs, and the rusted slide, Merry-Go-Round, and swings, and the large space like a missing tooth, I  can still imagine from when I was a young kid, the main attraction of the park for years, and one that made me beg my mother to bring me here, boarding the Number 3 bus at Crooks Avenue, and exiting at Piaget Avenue for the three block walk to the park. 

Kids used to line up along the sidewalk for what seemed like a mile, waiting not just for the waiting pool. The slide or swings, or even the Merry-Go-Round not rusted then, but for the massive full size -- because it was real -- World War II Mustang fighter, an attraction better than any found in any other parks, even the ones with cannons and tanks, only you couldn’t climb in the tanks the way you could climb in the plane or move the cannons’ barrel the way you could the Mustang joystick. You could flip switches, tap dials, open and close the hood, and for a moment, erase the vision of the park for the sky over Great Britain where this plane once fought -- until someone tapped on the glass to indicate you've had your turn and for you to move on.

After a while, so many kids flicked so many switches, the switches stopped being switches and holes appeared instead of gauges, and the plane -- which had not succumbed to the Nazis -- slowly surrendered to time and the youthful attack until the city hold the carcass away as junk.

Dave doesn't remember the plane; he does not believe it existed. Maybe this is a bit of envy for me having seen it when he could not, when we share all other sights equally, when we remember everything else together.

Then one of the high school kids named Bill or Bob or Buddy remembers who I am and what I said to him  near the stadium a week or so ago and decides this might be a time to get even, and rises along with six or seven or eight of his buddies, and I decide I'm not as hungry as I thought and leave half my chili dog unfinished, and decide this is a very good time to ride my bike.

Dave at first doesn't get it and wants to finish his meal first, then he gets it, and gives up on his meal too and follows me out.

We cut through the park to keep the kids with the cars from catching us, crossing through the stitched together ball fields that come to an end with a small stadium, where semi-professional ball players play baseball, though nobody playing there as we pass, our wheels leaving scars across the manicured grass of the infield, raising protests from the fields keeper picking up trash in the stands.

We reach the river before the cars do, and steer down one of the narrow dirt paths the cars won't come on because of the guardrail blocks it from the street, and  we take refuge at the river just as we always do, sitting on stones overlooking the flat surface and the rippling reeds, the curve of the Dundee Falls visible from the stream that just rises above it, and while we’re not completely sure for what we lost in the mists of the memories we share, we do not regret things we have seen or not seen, nor do we ache over things we lost or may have never had.

But Dave mumbles something about wanting to go back and finish his Chili dog.

I tell him it's already gone.