I’d never seen a Renault Dauphine before that August afternoon. I’d been basking in the sun on the painted wooden stoop of our tenement. It was close to noon and another high school summer vaca-tion day was drifting by.

Sly drove up in in the strange-looking car, it was small, low, and short and black.

“Where’d you get that?” I said, never knowing Sly to have a car or a driver’s license for that matter.

Newark was a bustling post-world war II metropolis, and I was maybe seven, possibly eight years old. A long time ago. There were no air-conditioned buses then and the beige-colored bus I was on had split windows; they were metal frames that slipped from the top only, down one half of the opening. On Saturdays, I rode to the church where, in the sacristy, I would polish the candelabra that decorated the main altar at Mass on Sunday. It was summer, and the sun had climbed atop the city. As I remember, the ride was like any other, for a while. My bus

I was lucky. I had enough rags wrapped around my toes that the frost ceased to grasp me with terror. The shed was sixty feet long and eighteen feet wide and its only entry was a door-less seven-foot-wide opening.