Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "richie-the-boot-boiardo"

When I remember the place where I lived until I was thirteen, I feel a deep, somewhat twisted connection with the writer I later became. I’ve never written about it, yet somehow I’m always writing about it. The danger. The mystery.

Back when Mom was still taking me for walks, before I became four years old and she turned me loose, I remember her pointing to a sizable thicket of thorny bushes and telling me, “Don’t ever go in there. That’s where old Mrs. Botone was picking blackberries and fell into the cesspool and almost drowned.”

“What’s a cesspool, Mom?”

“It’s not nice, sweetie.”

And that was that. Danger. Mystery.

The blackberry patch in question was just on the far side of the woods street by our house. It was a woods street because someone had planned a street and laid sidewalks that were still there, but trees had since grown up in between. It was a scene evocative of what my Chaucer professor later called “transience.”

Dad kept beehives on the near sidewalk. We kids were told to let the bees alone and they would let us alone. On the other side of the house was a pasture through which ran a brook. If we went over there, we were to watch out for cows. We were to stay away from the men with machine guns who guarded the Mafia guy’s mansion just down the street. We were also to stay away from other men with machine guns who guarded the Nike base diagonally across the street. Also, we were warned from time to time, never get between a groundhog and its hole.

I met a cow once and survived by ducking through the barbed wire, then running. But I was very nearly done in by an enraged groundhog. No kidding. It was charging for its hole with its chisel teeth leveled at me and I stepped out of its way just in time. That was before I realized how truly psycho groundhogs are: when I found one climbing a tree (!!) and it growled, threatening to jump me.

Despite such perils, Mom and Dad always dismissed us from the house with utmost placidity. It was almost as if they wanted us to get killed. Along with my two older brothers, Ben and Jim, I had perfect freedom, barring a few stay-aways such as the Nike base (military installation), the strong-arm men (Mafia), the bees, cows, woodchucks and, of course, the cesspool.

“What’s a cesspool, Ben?”

He just laughed.

Ben and Jim constructed wondrously lofty and rickety tree houses to which we would climb without benefit of stairs. They used my Dad’s tools. So did I. If I felt like it, I took a hatchet and hacked away at anything that grew in the woods street. Similarly, Ben once shoveled a huge hole just because. Maybe he wanted to have a cesspool. He dug down about ten feet and found some soft discolored soil plus bone fragments that Dad said were maybe a dead Indian. In our Mafia neighbor’s back yard, it was rumored, were more recent graves.

But a murderous gangster seemed like nothing compared to world annihilation via the atom bomb, the ultimate transience, which was serenely discussed over dinner as a daily possibility. Never mind duck-and-cover drill in school; heck, we had missile launchers within hollering distance of our house, although we never got to see them because they were up the hill behind the guards and a chain-link fence. But Ben and I were building a dam in the brook once and the Army came and told us to stop. Apparently we were messing up their cesspool.

They were nice about it, though, and didn’t frighten us. The strong-arm men were another matter. I would see them when I went to visit the Lurkers. Never have I met a family more aptly named. The Lurkers lurked in their shack beside the Mafia gates. Their children had prominent ears, walked with their feet at a chevron angle, and for some reason, perhaps proximity to the Mafia guardhouses, they seemed half a bubble off plumb. From their yard we could watch the men with machine guns waiting to open the big iron gates for their boss, and once I saw his limousine pull in, and I saw the Mafia man’s face. Something stony about his jowls and eyes impressed on me that he was Not Nice, as my mother would say. Very, very Not Nice.

The Mafia guy was scary, but his mailbox was just plain weird. Truly. Like the Lurkers, it was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, about twelve feet tall and six feet wide, made of filigree wrought iron, with the mailbox in the middle and above it a kind of shield topped with the head of a dead goat with glass eyes. You know, stuffed. Taxidermy.

There were other weird things in the neighborhood, such as a cacophanous pasture full of donkeys and peacocks. But in retrospect, the weirdest aspect of my childhood place was not things I saw; it was things invisible to see. I never saw the Mafia mansion, just the gates; I never saw the missile base, just the entrance; and I never saw the cesspool. Danger and mystery were okay, apparently, so long as we didn’t look.

I became a writer in large part because I wanted to look.

My childhood’s setting was Beaufort Avenue, Livingston, New Jersey, and in the 1950s it must have been the last pocket of farmed land in the megalopolis. Now it’s industrial park/housing-development/freeway. My house is gone. The monstrously ornate mailbox topped with a goat’s head is gone, and so are the Lurkers, but the massive gates beside which they lurked are still there. The Mafioso who lived in the mansion was “Richie the Boot” Boiardo. I find, Googling him, that his place was indeed the east coast burial site; in fact, he had a crematorium in back. His mansion, with its seventeen acres of grounds, is still there. The Nike base is now Riker’s Hill Park, but the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with me. As for the cesspool, I have no idea.