Vince’s neighbors generally had no objection to us hanging on the corner. Some did, however – as I mentioned elsewhere, Angelo the special cop once stuck his gun in my face when I failed to respect his authoritah. The pasty-faced Johnson family across the street was also against our hanging-out – when the number of kids on the corner reached some arbitrary maximum decided by them, they would call the police to disperse us.
Back then there was a form of street litter rarely seen today. Birth-control pills hadn’t been invented yet and there were no in-town motels, so used condoms lay wherever they had been plopped out of quietly opened car doors. If Frankie G spotted one near Vince’s after dark, he’d pick it up with a stick and hang it on the antenna of the Johnsons’ Studebaker.
