Clancy - The Clancys of Queens

Im the whirling dervish of Queens, spinning around and around, arms flapping, my fathers boxing gloves like cinder blocks strapped to my seven-year-old hands. With a single left hook, Tommy OReilly, my best friend, has just knocked me blind. But the goddamn gloves are so heavy, I cant even lift them, so, unable to punch or see, I start flapping and spinning, gaining speed as I go, praying the added centrifugal force will do the trickand if science fails me, at least Ill look so nuts that maybe he wont try again.

The ring is our front yard, a splotch of grass split in half by a cement path and hemmed by a short and shabby chain-link fence that surrounds both of our houses: mine looks exactly like a single-wide trailer, but its actually a converted former boat shed that sits in front of Tommys proper two-story Colonial. The whole setup is like some modern-day feudal arrangement, except instead of a lord and lady, theres the OReillys. And instead of it being medieval Europe, its Broad Channel, Queens, 1987.

I live in the shed with my fatherI am a first-grader, he is a cop, and we are the serfs. For the past five years my dad has lived in the OReillys old boat shed because it was the first place in his hometown he could find, and afford, after my parents divorce.

I spend every other weekend there with him, and we have a routine. We share the pullout couch, and after he falls asleep, I crawl out from the crook of his back to the end of the bed and turn up the heat on our electric blanket. In the morning he tells me not to do it again.

Because there is nowhere to go when we get out of bed, we dont. Instead, first thing in the morning he turns his tube socks into puppets called Filbert and Albert, who are mute and whose only shtick is fighting and making up. My dad can keep them going for close to an hour.

Eventually we have our breakfast and go to Mass, and then I spend the rest of the day playing with Tommy OReilly. Every so often playing just means trying to punch each other in the face.

Broad Channel is a bread crumb of an island between Howard Beach and Rockaway, with a single through street, Cross Bay Boulevard, and cross streets that dead-end at the water. Far off in the distance you can see Manhattan, its familiar miniature metal geometry in a strange frame of fog and reeds.

Weve got no supermarket, high school, pharmacy, or library. Almost everything is on the other side of the bridges at either end of our town. For better or worse, we are 2,500-odd people adrift in Jamaica Bay, untethered from the rest of the world. Really. No poetics intendeddespite being in Queens, Broad Channel isnt even connected to the New York City sewage lines. Instead, we have septic tanks. Even our shit cant escape.

Most people here are Irish Catholic, so we do have more than our share of bars and a church, St. Virgilius. My dad was an altar boy there and has been a devout Catholic ever since. In fact, becoming a cop was his second-choice career. His first was to be a priest. He even went into the seminary, fervently hoping God would call him. As it turns out, He didnt. My dad left with no hard feelings and soon afterward discovered that, while he wasnt cut out for bringing Gods love to the masses, he was just great at throwing them in jail. He became a warrant-squad cop, which is basically a bounty hunter for the NYPD.

In addition to our bars and church, Broad Channel has two corner stores, one owned by Mr. and Mrs. Kroog and the other owned by Kim. We call them Kroogs and Kims, which may or may not be the actual names of the stores.

I love Kroogs because, together with the typical candy and chips, the store also sells all the old 50s-era toys: jacks, yo-yos, and those paddles with a rubber ball attached by stringthe kinds of toys kids never have a hard time getting their dads to buy.

Kim is a friend of ours and the sum total of Broad Channels ethnic diversity. Since I turned seven, my dad has been letting me walk the three blocks from our house to Kims, alone, to get us our snacks: Yankee Doodles for him and a twenty-five-cent bag of BBQ potato chips for me. But Dad tells me I have to walk up Cross Bay to get there, not along the more desolate Shad Creek Road, where we live. The one time he caught me taking the unapproved route, I was grounded. (In our little house, which has only one room, that meant being banished to the couch.)

That particular time I sat there mouthing, I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

Finally, Dad yelled, Stop that, will ya?!

Im calling the police! I said, naturally.

He cracked up, then looked me dead in the eye and said, I AM the police.