One day during the summer my mother takes me on a bus trip to New York City to visit her cousin. I was never in the city before that. As soon as we get out of the bus on Eighth Avenue, I am impressed by the rich stink, not the garbage-and-urine city stink we know today, but the honest, heavy stink of cows and massive amounts of cow manure. We are at the blocks-long cattle pens of the West Side stockyards, in the city’s slaughterhouse district. My mother half-apologizes for the stink and we start walking east. After a few blocks the air freshens and we go into an Automat, the fast-food restaurant of the day. At the change booth my mother pushes two dollar bills across a marble sill and a brass chute delivers a shower of nickels.
There are walls of sandwiches, pies and much more, each on its own clean plate and behind its own swing-up glass door. Drop enough nickels into the slot, turn the knob, lift the door, slide out your choice. Coffee is a nickel – grab an empty cup, insert your nickel, turn slowly the S-shaped handle to dispense an exact cupful. We grab a table for four, sitting across from each other. Very soon a man approaches and asks “Is this seat taken?”. It isn’t, we say, and he takes a seat between us. Unlike myself, my mother is unfazed by this. There is minimal but cordial conversation. We finish, say goodbye to our new friend and leave. The Automat did not expect its customers to bus their tables.
We head eastward to Third Avenue, home of the Third Avenue Elevated, sort of an above-ground subway line. When we get to our cousin’s building, it stands facing the El and about fifty feet from the tracks. Her apartment is on the third floor and the windows are open. I remember our cousin apologizing for the train noise but it really didn’t seem so bad after a while.
After the ladies get settled in the kitchen, I go back to the front room. Trains come by in one direction or the other every five minutes or so. I am old enough to read and I lie on the carpet by the window and read my Bucky Bug comic.
