Fire Escape Diva

A month or more ago, I submitted a piece to a little magazine called Back to the Bronx. It was acknowledged, but I am assuming that it did not make the cut having heard nothing further. I think it is pretty good. But I leave it to you. And either way, I kind of want to have the memory join the internet nostalgia train.

The actual fire escape is long gone but the image is accurate of my child's balcony.

I have been living in Los Angeles for more than half my life. Yet, I am a Bronxite through and through. To say I am “from the Bronx”, specifically Townsend Avenue between 174th Street and Mt. Eden Avenue, is to say effectively that I am from another planet, so different is the lifestyle here from that of our beloved Burrough. I live now in a neighborhood that people think to be quite urban, crushingly so. But here, at midnight I can look out my window and hear crickets and see not one car for ten minutes. This is nearly “the country”, as we used to call any place that was over the George Washington Bridge. There is no comparison of here to there. To be from “the Bronx” can certainly only be understood by those who grew up there. Trying to describe it to the native-born of this climate heaven is often unsatisfying. I must seek out my own, those of us, even the most protected by our parents, who played “scully” on the sidewalk, or learned to roller skate while going downhill, stoop sitting as the sun went down while eating a too quickly melting Chocolate Éclair Good Humour Bar.


I have many favorite memories made shinier by the passage of time and the encroaching sentimentality of the proximity of my dotage. But this one nearly physically sends me back to a time and place long gone. I am no more than 8 or 9 years old. I can still reach out and grab my joy at what was for me a rare unguarded moment on our one bedroom fire escape. My parents and I, the only child, lived at the back side of our building, 1596 Townsend Avenue, overlooking a long, cavernous alley that faced another building of equal size. It was my version of “Rear Window”, with views into the lives of neighbors I would never meet but about whom I would always speculate, even to this day. Our fire escape, on the fourth floor of a five floor brick walk up, was the balcony to this world.

I have told more than a few horrified Los Angelinos that we played on those fire escapes and without supervision, except for an occasional visual check, and a passing, “Don’t stay out there too long!” It was dangerous. It was gloriously dangerous. One of my aunts and an uncle, lived next door to us, sharing the fire escape. I would move along the wall (to avoid the stairwell and the space into which the stairwell descended, no doubt to certain death) to get to their window and then, surprisingly without being a pint sized peeping Tom, returning to my own. I just wanted to see if I could make the journey, as I was actually afraid of heights.

With a blanket to cover the metal slats so I could not look down, I owned the space. I brought all my dolls out there. I could see the curtain moving on one of the windows across from me, some neighbor afraid to be known, but always wanting to know what was going on outside her little apartment. I could hear the vibrations of the violin played by someone else whose curtains remained steadfastly closed. I always assumed it was a man. Only today, as I write, do I wonder whether perhaps it was a woman, longing to have a career like her male counterpart in a time when that was not so readily possible. Even then, hearing the strains of a concerto for violin the name of which I never knew or cannot remember seemed incongruous with the location, a dirty, dusty, gray concrete and brick setting. But it was a wondrous incongruity that perhaps planted the seed in me that grew into a desire to cross a boundary few in my family ever did—to leave New York and go somewhere else and try to be something different-- maybe something creative that was not available to my parents’ generation.

How often did I go out there? I don’t remember, but it was likely at least once a week. All children pretend, but as an only child, I cultivated pretend into entire screenplays. But it was almost always directed within, to myself where no one else could hear and certainly no one could critique.

I have rarely acted out my impulses, less then than now in any case. And to be frank, the last major impulse I had, upon which I did act at the advanced age of 27, and after law school, was to move to California. I cannot tell you how many people told me that I would fail, either directly or indirectly. And yet that impulse turned out in my favor, all of the bumps and potholes notwithstanding (they have those here too in Los Angeles!).

On that fire escape, when was it, in the early to mid-1960s, there was no thought of someplace like California, except when I watched Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” on my parents’ black and white television or when my mother mangled the name of one of her favorite actors, Ricardo Montalban (she would say “Montalblan”). There was only, in one unexpected moment, the need to express myself fully, from this jutting stage to the empty alley world of which I was the only inhabitant. It was a, me I did not know. The uncharacteristically brave one got up from her blanket, abandoning her dolls and went to the corner of the fire escape. Pressing against and embraced by the rusting railings upon which I/she placed her hands, she surveyed the alley as an opera singer might her theatre and her adoring audience. But this was no gilded theatre. There was the laundry that hung out on some of the lines. On the ground below there were the trash cans amid which cats lived and bred and sometimes died.

I was the child-diva aware of no living creature, although surely behind one of those windows someone was watching, with veiled amusement. Had I been aware of any such person, perhaps I would have interrupted my impulse with my then usual fear and meekness, retreating to my bedroom. But there being no one of whom I was cognizant, including my mother, I felt free and even invulnerable. I began to sing, and loudly enough so that the alley echoed back my tune. I would be lying if I said I remembered the music I selected. It could have been some television theme. It might even have been one of the Latin dance songs that my father favored in those days, a rumba, a meringue, a mambo. It doesn’t matter to the memory. It was fabulous simply to let go! The more my sound echoed back to me, the more I wanted to hear the echo. The whole thing probably lasted no more than a minute or two, but what a magnificent interlude.

I lived sixteen years in that apartment. My desire to hang about the fire escape no doubt waned shortly after this episode. I never burst into song there again, this much I do know.

I would love to be able to visit that back alley and look up at fire escape where once I intoned in unalloyed innocence, before I knew who I was or would become. It remains a great regret that the building, and I see from looking at Google maps, many of the surrounding buildings, was a victim of the struggles of the Bronx during the late sixties and seventies. We moved to the area around the Jerome Reservoir. My mother died only four years after that. The innocence of that day on the fire escape on Townsend Avenue naturally dissipated with the process of growing up.

Although the good news is that a public school stands on the site and so a meritorious use of the space is being made for future generations, the bad news is that I have few photographs of the building and must rely almost exclusively on the memories. I want so much to be able to show to my later in life friends, the ones who did not know me when I was taking the number 1 bus on the Grand Concourse to school, a picture of that alley, the fire escape, the building across the way. I want to convey to them what I saw that liberating day as I belted out a song, without care for past, present or future. I want to convey the smell of the Bronx on a summer’s day. I want to convey that which created the essence of me, the Bronx kid who moved across the country but still, in a way, standing on that fire escape trying to grab the gusto of life.

By the way, there was no way that I could know that day all those years ago, that I would meet my mother’s fave, for ever so brief a moment, at my Los Angeles Church—Ricardo Montalban. He was congratulating me, not on my singing, but on my reading from a lectern. Close enough.

I wish my mother had been alive for me to share that moment with her. She would still have gotten his name wrong.

It’s a long way from the fire escape.