Kid Law

Kid Law

S. Hileman Iannazzo

8/12/2021

“1...2..3...Red Light!” I shouted with my back towards the other kids, I turned quickly to see if anyone was still moving, thus eliminating them from the game. No luck. I turned my back on them once again. “1...2...3...Green Light'' This time I can hear the rushed footsteps of a dozen or so kids racing towards me. I didn’t even get to yell ‘Red Light’ again before Jamie bolted past me, effectively winning the game. We all knew Jamie was the fastest of all the kids in the neighborhood, and after the required debate on whether or not he cheated, we collapsed on the stoops and curbs that made up our playground. It was summertime, the days were long and hot, and the rag tag group of kids that gathered outdoors in the projects were glad for it. Anything beat going to school, that we all agreed on. If it got too hot, we’d scrounge up a quarter somewhere, grab a towel and walk up to the state pool where 25 cents let you swim all day in a crowded oversized pool with two looming diving boards, two teenage life guards, and a hundred other kids all pissing in the heavily chlorinated water. Looking back, it was money well spent.

Red Light was considered a baby game for the rough and tough fourth graders we would be in the fall, but sometimes we’d get bored, and we’d resort to all the ‘kiddie’ games. Red Rover would usually end in violence, not a gang war, but for sure someone was getting knocked to the ground. Hide and Seek was best played at night and without flashlights. Most of us were allowed to stay out after dark as long as we didn’t leave yelling distance. It was cutthroat and every man for himself . A kid would turn on his best friend like a rabid dog for a coveted place to hide. The older kids usually won, but it was the hunt that brought us all an adrenaline rush that made the game worthwhile.

The projects we lived in were located on the south side of a small, diverse city in northern Massachusetts. Lawrence has and had a reputation for being gritty, and we kids, a product of Generation X, had working parents and broken homes. And we ran wild. We’d cover miles in a day, drinking from spickets and cashing in cans for a bit of candy money. We traveled in packs, inventing elaborate games, drawing inspiration from movies like Star Wars and Jaws. There was always someone to play with.

I was lucky, I met my best friend right after we moved in. He was a lot like me, introverted, creative, but mostly he was loyal. We linked up as a duo, Ronnie and I. Didn’t bother him that I was a girl, didn’t bother me that he was a boy, even if we did get teased once in a while. We were 2 seven year olds with a lot of freedom. Well freedom isn’t exactly what we had. Ronnie's mother was a hard ass and a strict disciplinarian, we got around her rules by lying through our teeth. My mothers only rules were to “check in '' a few times a day and leave a note on the kitchen table if you were gonna be at someones’ house. It was the projects, everywhere was someone’s house. Our parents all knew each other, and they knew all the kids we played with, and it wasn’t unusual for someone else’s mom to tell you to cut the shit, and because we had it drilled into us to respect adults, you can bet we obliged. No one wanted to risk their mom running into so and so’s mom at the clotheslines or the corner store and mentioning our transgressions.

Solution? Get the hell out of dodge. We’d congregate in the places grown ups didn’t visit. The dump. The swamp behind the old Army Reserve. Under the bleaches of the football stadium across the street. Down by the ‘office’ where you paid your rent, and occasionally got some free cheese. Behind that building my brother broke his arm, leaping from the concrete wall to a rusted metal beam that connected a silo to the main building. It was also the best place to break bottles, we took breaking bottles very seriously.

We’d play on the edge of the parking lot across from the drug store and a low end department store. We nicknamed this place “the rocks”. It amounted to a steep but small incline, a place where action figures could roam freely and setting up the battles took half the day. If you got thirsty or hungry, there was a ‘packie’ and a Baker's Dozen steps away.

We spent Saturdays walking up Winthrop Ave to the movie theater to see Indiana Jones and Superman. It was a buck and a half to get in, but we’d all developed ‘systems’ to see a movie for free. Hang around in the bathrooms until the movie started and then, with false bravado, walk right into the theater and have a seat. My brother would even take a discarded popcorn bucket to the concession stand and say someone spilled his, always resulting in a free refill. I’m sure I saw hundreds of movies there, when pg and r ratings were brand new and no one cared if you bought tickets to the latest Friday the 13th. Some days, we’d stay and watch the same movie twice.

We’d roll down the big hill behind the theater, landing at the bottom covered in grass. We’d cut across the street to the long gone bowling alley and check the arcade games for quarters. It was a great place to get out of the rain or wind, but usually after 15 minutes or so, management told us to split. That was ok too, especially since I sucked at Donkey Kong. Ronnie was much better at video games. We’d walk home, cutting through the playground, avoiding the heavy steel merry go round because just sitting on it was an open invitation for someone bigger to start spinning it. A kid had to choose to jump off or wait it out, turning green with nausea, until the spinner de jour got bored. Instead, we’d climb to the top of the metallic monkey bars, where oddly, we’d have intense conversations. Yes, I had seen the newest episode of Fraggle Rock, no I didn’t think Luke could beat Han in a fight, even with the force. In our imagined isolation at the tippy top of the bars, we’d quote Eddie Murphy and Richord Pryor, swearing like seasoned truck drivers. We’d practice and perfect our imitation of Robin Wiliams’s Popeye laugh, and end the afternoon insulting each other with, (god forgive us) a slew of “Your Mama” jokes.

We basked in the ignorance that each of us were poor, that each of our families were struggling to make ends meet and it didn’t seem unusual to us that sometimes our dinners were rice and hot dogs, or a 75 cent box of pancake batter. It didn’t matter because we didn't know. I just assumed this was how all kids lived. I think we all assumed that. So we’d swing dangerously high on the swings, yelling out dirty limericks and seeing who had the balls to jump off mid swing and land in the sand below.

We’d mosey home, filthy and sweaty. Sometimes we’d eat quickly and then reconvene outside, using stolen shopping carts to play crashem derby, or continue to work on a tree house we would never finish building.

Subsidised housing, with 8 units to each pastel colored building, provided access to the “playroads” aptly named since cars were not allowed to drive or park on these stone streets. Pedal bikes, skateboards and Big Wheels were its only traffic. Sometimes we’d sit on the broken chain link fence nearby that in our imaginations could be a ship, surrounded by sharks, or a place saving us from quicksand. We were kids who wore tattered sneakers and hand me down jeans with ironed on patches on the knees. Our mothers used food stamps at checkout counters, we had heat all year round because maintenance never came round to fix the constantly broken radiators. We drank watered down Kool Aid, ate freeze pops for lunch and for that couple of years, we were the happiest we’d ever be in our young lives. Kids looking out for each other, kids taking whole days trying to build a bike jump that inevitably would end with injury. There seemed no limit to the games and dares we made up, there were no grudges, and disagreements were handled on the spot, and without grown ups nosing around to muck things up. We were children, governed by ‘kid law’. When we stepped off our stoops to meet friends who were waiting for us on the dried lawn, everything that was wrong with our lives ceased to exist. A new day was starting, we’d sit on the curb and tie the shoes we were too impatient to tie before we’d rushed out to play. If a kid didn’t have a dad, no one cared, if a kid had a mother who was never at home, that kid came home with you for supper. We didn’t judge, we didn’t discuss these things, we simply did what all kids do, we excelled at creating alternative realities, accepting of our peers who all had their own troubles in the confines of their own apartments. We were, quite simply, project kids.

*Epilogue. These are some of my favorite childhood memories, and 40 years later my best friend is still Ronnie. With the invention of Facebook, I know where a lot of those kids are now. We did alright for ourselves, all things considered.