Richie Rich and Brighton Beach

By Billy Hathorn at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

The hero’s journey and I had our first introduction back in the 1980s when my mother and grandmother would decide, almost weekly in the summertime, to take us out to Brighton Beach on the subway. And the place where I always passed my personal Rubicon from the known to the unknown was at our neighborhood’s subway newsstand. Here my kid brother would decide whether the trip would be a total misery or just a partial one, depending on which comic book he chose.

My own adventure began as most heroes’ journeys do, in the comfort of home, surrounded by all the familiar joys and problems. In summertime school was a million years behind us and a million miles off in the future. My brother and I were nestled inside our sinking mattress of a full-sized bed, doing our best to sleep in a puddle of warm sweat.

At always the deepest of dead-sleep moments, Gram would yell from downstairs in a piercing voice that could awaken the Kraken: “YOO-HOO, boys! It’s time to go ta the beeeeach!”

We’d awaken, he and I. Believe you me. There was no sleeping past that sing-songy siren blast of hers. We’d stare at the dented tin ceiling for a couple of seconds, slack-jawed, in damp twisted sheets. The breeze from the box fan whirring on the dresser at the foot of the bed had long lost whatever coolness it had gotten the night before when Gram had placed a silver bucket of ice in front of it to give us, as she claimed, something “better than air conditioning!”

We’d peel ourselves from the sheets like a pair of Kraft cheese singles and schlump downstairs, the most miserable pair of boys in Brooklyn. More than two months without alarm clocks and this villainous mother-and-daughter combo wanted to go to the beach at the crack of dawn? Before it got “too hot?” What kind of madness ran in our family?

There was much whirling action downstairs. Ma and Gram would be getting ready for the D-Day invasion of Brighton Beach. Everything was being done with well-trained precision. Sandwiches and fruit were being wrapped in tin foil, beach chairs and blankets were being pulled from closets. Thermoses were filled with ice tea. And there was enough sunscreen for us and baby oil for Ma on the kitchen table to grease up the innards of a 747.

Yes, baby oil. Since her childhood in the fifties, Ma had been under the impression she needed to charbroil herself on public beaches from Memorial Day to Labor Day. By the time the calendar said you were no longer able to wear white, she looked like a baby back rib.

Then I’d go soak in the ice-cold water of the shower, knowing I’d not feel this good until I came home and had another shower at the end of this murderous day. My brother would keep himself entertained with morning cartoons until it was his turn. I prayed to God under the showerhead that those cartoons would not inspire any truly stupid purchases on his part at the newsstand. At about six he was easily influenced by idiocy.

Brighton Beach was in Brooklyn but not in our part of Brooklyn. For me at age eight or so, any part of Brooklyn outside of a ten-block radius around our house in Carroll Gardens was like traveling to a foreign country. Usually we only ever made brief expeditions into these strange and exotic lands. We’d slip into Downtown Brooklyn so Gram could torture us for a couple of hours while she bought new brassieres at Abraham and Strauss or up to Fifth Avenue in Park Slope so she and Ma could debate over doilies or be tempted by new ice tea pitchers. The only thing that mattered to my brother and me is if Gram had promised us a “little treat” before we left. This didn’t always happen—but it always got us in line. Treats often meant a comic book from a newsstand or an action figure at Platt’s Toy Store on Fifth Avenue. A lot of doilies and bras could be put up with for a four-inch Star Wars or G.I. Joe guy.

But Brighton Beach was never a sojourn of a couple hours. It was an all-day affair, one that almost always guaranteed a treat or two from Gram.

“Be good and I’ll get you a little treat.”

Long ride, a stinking grafitti-covered subway, lots of sweating, lots of sun, lots of prep before and cleanup after and endless walking … but a treat.

Yes, we’ll be good, Gram! Please!

Which brings me to the neighborhood newsstand.

The neighborhood newsstand in those days was a cornucopia of kids’ treats. Sure, it had all those necessary adult things like newspapers and magazines and cigarettes, but look here and there and it was a feast for the greedy eyes and mouths of kids everywhere. Gum and chips and sunflower seeds, chocolate bars, ice cream bars in freezers and glass Cokes in refrigerators. Sometimes small and kind of junky toys would be clipped to a string dancing above our heads. But mostly, newsstands were the home to racks of comic books.

Now since we were heading up Smith Street to the Carroll Street station at an early-morning hour that even a battle-hardened Marine would dread, there was no way on God’s Green Earth that we would be getting chocolate or soda as a treat. But comics—ah that was another thing. Ma would let us read the back of a cereal box so long as we were reading. And at that moment I was just entering my long-term phase as a comic book freak.

I had been introduced to cool superhero comics by my older cousin maybe a year or so before. No more Batman or Superman for me. Daredevil by Frank Miller was where I was at. Or the X-Men penned by Chris Claremont. Or the Fantastic Four, having once again become “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!” under the stewardship of John Byrne. The stories told by these genius creators were just two little quarters away from my eager hands.

I did mental math like a pro when it came to comics. Comics were 50 cents in those days, 75 cents for an annual or a double-issue. Gram would definitely part with a buck or a buck and a quarter for my brother and me so long as we agreed to share them on the 45-minute ride out to Brighton Beach.

There was only one problem. My kid brother.

At six, he hadn’t quite gotten the message that certain comics were, well, lame. He needed to get onboard and get a good superhero comic. I’d even deal with Superman or Batman so long as he didn’t go to his usual haul and screw up the whole day.

What was in his usual haul? Anything to do with Disney. He had a particular affection for Scrooge McDuck and his money bin. But those comics were almost tolerable compared to one of his go-to favorites: Richie Rich.

For people unfamiliar with Richie Rich, his nickname in the comics was “the poor little rich boy.” He was blond, mid-parted, chubby-cheeked and matched short pants with a tuxedo jacket and bow tie. He was also really … nice. But he had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. So he built a lot of useless junk like houses made out of gold bars and bought gold-plated helicopters for his friends like Little Dot and Little Lotta. (I kid you not.)

If my brother bought a Richie Rich comic, I’d be stuck on that long, hot, stinky subway ride with maybe just a single issue of Daredevil.

Sometimes in my own small and stupid way I’d try to convince him to get a comic I wanted. But Ma would always put the kibosh on that. “Let your brother get what he wants. It’s his treat from Grandma.”

So I’d eye two or three comics I’d like, pick one and pray a lighting round of Hail Marys hoping that he’d pick one of the others.

Unfortunately, there were times that there was no way to get around the fact that halfway through the train trip, he’d get bored with Richie Rich and want my Fantastic Four or X-Men … and I’d have to share it with him.

They say God sends lessons through our trials. To an ignorant boy of eight or so, there’s no greater trial imaginable than being forced to read Richie Rich while your kid brother was reading the only good comic at hand—yours. You could never hate the concept of kindness more, reading about how that poor little rich boy did something stupid and generous with his gold bullion.

The F train ride out to Brighton Beach and Coney Island was and is still mostly elevated, so even if the air conditioning was actually working in the subway cars, it was only ever doing so when the doors were not open between stops and hot air was blasting in. So I’d sweat, look out at the tar rooftops of Brooklyn, sniff at smiling Richie Rich and try to imagine the only endurable part of the trip, finally getting to the water where I could pretend to be Namor the Sub-Mariner. But eventually we’d make it to our stop, West 8th Street-New York Aquarium, and then have to exit the station with the other 84,212 people who thought it’d be a good idea to schlep 100 pounds of beach gear on the subway.

I remember the long haul from that station well. There was a series of ramps that led to a boardwalk path that eventually reached the main boardwalk at Brighton Beach and Coney Island. In the fever dreams of the heat, the crowd and the carrying of gear, it never felt like we’d reach the end. And when we did, what Ma and Gram likely expected was not what matched reality.

Even today I think the pair of them still saw Brighton Beach and Coney Island as they had been in their respective youths and not as they actually looked in the 1980s. Having known no other reality, I accepted that the urban world was just supposed to look … crappy. It wasn’t until I got older and began watching old movies that I had realized that the New York City of earlier decades was not, in fact, a hellscape. Parts of it had actually been nice. And that these nice, almost glowing beaches of their minds’ eyes were in fact real.

This was not the case in Brooklyn of the 1980s. In Brooklyn of the 1980s, you made the best of what you got. And part of that was marching across a very battered boardwalk in the hopes of finding a tiny clean piece of sand.

There was also the summer of syringes. I can’t remember which one. But this was in the days when they were hauling garbage in barges out of the city and medical waste—including syringes—were washing up on the beaches. Nice.

Lots of garbage washed up on the beaches back then. Collections of plastic bags, bottles and cups came cruising in along with the seaweed and jellyfish. The waves sometimes had a sheen to them. You just assumed it was oil and tried to move away. We had a lot of fun picking through the crap that washed up to find seashells. I remember getting a sweet score of them inside of an old tire.

There was also the stuff left behind by beachgoers: food wrappers, cigarette butts, chicken bones, broken glass bottles. (I still don’t know how someone is able to smash a glass bottle on a beach.) I don’t blame most people for leaving that stuff behind. Most of the mesh public garbage cans were overflowing with trash and never seemed to get emptied, leaving glorious gifts for the seagulls.

The boardwalk itself was in a sad state. You couldn’t go barefoot on it because there were so many nails sticking up. In places the boards were so rotted out that cops just used to take three or so not-so-overflowing garbage cans and use them to make a barricade with crime scene tape. Sometimes the same boards would stay broken the entire summer.

The public bathrooms I can’t tell you about. We were never allowed to use them. Ma and Gram had enough sense to assume that serial killers lived in them. From what I heard about their interior conditions, it sounded like a safe bet.

If we had to actually use the bathroom, Gram would throw on the waterworks and ask a restaurant owner to let a poor old lady and her grandkids to use it. Or in an emergency we’d pee in the water. Then move quickly away.

As Ma charbroiled herself on the blanket, Gram would haul us out to the water. She loved splashing in the waves. She had bought a black one-piece bathing suit in 1928 and made good use out of it every summer since. She especially liked jumping up and down in the waves with us dangling off her back. Gram was a poor judge of height and nearly drowned each of us a half-dozen times every summer but she always had a good time.

Near-death experience aside, I preferred to stay in the water rather than get out and suffer under the sun, the blowing sand and the continuous application of sunscreen by my barbequed mother. I was a lousy swimmer but my imagination was good enough to pretend I was Namor emerging from Atlantis to menace the surface-dwellers who had so bespoiled his noble aquatic kingdom.

But Namor would eventually get hungry. And that would force him to race across blistering sand on his not-so-invulnerable bare feet toward his mother to get a sandwich.

After Ma and Gram passed out the wares, Ma would finally decide that she had cooked enough and wanted to take a dip. I’d watch her walk down to the shore, her head down and a bit self-conscious, and make her way into the surf. I can still see the way she gasped as the cold waves hit her legs, her mouth a great big round O, but there was a trace of a delighted smile behind it.

Ma was a good swimmer. She always went out further than the three of us ever did. I remember that when we would go to the beach with her best friend Sarah and her family, Sarah would always chide her for going out too far. She had a fine backstroke. I can still see her thin arms rising out of the water to point skyward for a second before returning to the water. Her body was always just a line on the sun-dappled horizon, her arm another line.

I was scared that she’d drown. But I usually kept that down because she also seemed really free to me then. She hadn’t often looked very free since she had gotten the guts to leave my alcoholic old man and move into Gram’s very old but clean little house. She worked a lot. She worried more. I liked seeing her feel free. It almost made up for the fact that my bologna sandwich was usually soggy and sandy.

But with Ma out there and Gram here on the blanket with us, my mind was churning with possibilities.

There were always random guys hauling food around the beach. Some dragged coolers of ice cream behind them. Others hauled hot dogs and pretzels. In all likelihood none of them were licensed, but all across Brooklyn no ice cream sandwich or big salty pretzel ever tasted better.

“Ice cream man! Yo, ice cream! Ice cream here!”

Gram, my kid brother and me turned like a three-headed beast in the direction of that voice. The brothers Mari tossed doe eyes at Gram. She looked down to the water at Ma, tipped us a wink and put her finger to her lips.

“YOO-HOO! Ice cream man!!!”

No piece of writing can accurately depict the deafening way Gram could call out. Once the “yoo-hoo” started every head in a hundred-yard circumference would turn in our direction. By the time she got to the “man” part of her call, people riding the Cyclone over in Astroland started worrying the wooden roller coaster was being hit by an earthquake.

We didn’t care. Gram was opening her little purse so she could give my kid brother his Chipwich sandwich and I could get my Toasted Almond. All was right in the world.

I never liked to be sticky. I especially didn’t like to be sticky on top of being hot and sweaty so I learned very early on how to eat ice cream without losing a drip. I might’ve been a neat freak but I made sure Gram got her money’s worth. My kid brother hadn’t gotten the memo and often looked like an ice-cream vampire before long. Ultimately this would require a trip down to the shore so Gram could help him clean up. About then Ma would emerge from the surf like a suntanned seal and take each of us by the hand. The four of us would stare out at the horizon in the surf and wonder about the slight outlines of boats in the deep distance and enjoy feeling the tide suck out the sand from our heels.

At some point they would agree it was time to start packing up to head home. And here was where some of the most difficult parts of the trip began.

It wasn’t just that we had to pack up all the stuff and march across hot sand while avoiding bits of broken beer bottles and take the long subway ride back. It wasn’t even likely having to read Richie Rich again. It was that Ma and Gram wanted to bring as little sand back into the house as possible, which meant the pair of us changing on the boardwalk.

Now how did we do this?

Well, Ma and Gram would hold beach towels around the pair of us while we shimmied out of our still saturated trunks and did our best to slap the sand off us—in front of everyone else on the boardwalk. This was all beyond mortifying, in part because Gram had a habit of dropping the towel shield because she was so focused on getting sand off of us. All I really remember of this experience was one or the other of them repeating over and over, “Be sure to get all the sand off!”

Somehow we’d eventually get into the clean shorts and t-shirts they had packed. The subway ride almost felt like a relief after all that. I can still remember the beach smell that clung to the inside of the car all the way home and how my hair was still crusty with sand and salt water.

But … there was more embarrassment to come.

Having spent the whole subway ride judging our condition, Ma and Gram would often decide that there was still too much sand on us. So they would march us out to our tiny backyard so we could take baths in our old plastic baby pool. We lived in a very small rowhouse. It wasn’t an impossibility that some neighbor on a higher floor could look down into our yard and see us.

We protested every time about this, even as they handed us Ivory soap and bottles of shampoo.

“Go on! Nobody’s looking!”

By the time we got into bed, we were as cool as could be having spent a fair amount of time cleaning ourselves off with the ice-cold water from a garden hose. Gram would then set her silver bucket of ice in front of our box fan. Then she’d squeeze our faces and give us squeaky kisses good night, telling us that we were such beau-ti-ful good boys and that she loved us so much.

Ma would come in next, her teeth bright against her dark skin, and ask if we’d had a good time. Richie Rich and Daredevil were piled on top of one another on the floor by the head of our bed.

“Sure, Ma.”

“I love that we can do this stuff together. I love you both so much.”

“We love you too, Ma.”

“Now go to sleep. And don’t fight over the sheets.”

We heard her turn on the little black and white TV in her bedroom next door. Usually she’d fall asleep watching reruns of The Honeymooners or an old late movie. After a time we’d settle down.

With our front window open to the street, the yellow light of the streetlamp made our room brighter than it normally was. For much of my life I had been afraid to go to sleep, never knowing what might happen. Not now. Everything in the room could be seen in clear outlines so I was unafraid of it. Ma was right there. And Gram was downstairs on the fold-out couch.

Then we would go to sleep, the richest little poor boys in Brooklyn.