It was a long time ago. So long ago that Elvis Presley's song, "You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog," was the top song on the AM radio and Hula Hoops were all the rage. The city was South Boston, MA and my home turf was the Old Harbor Projects, located just across from Carson Beach. (Now called the Mary Ellen McCormack Village.)
We were boys, ages eight, nine and ten. We were fast, brave, and always on the lookout for new challenges and things to conquer. We lived, and waited, for any kid on our block of projects to tell us we couldn't do something, or that we were too young or too chicken. Because whenever we heard words like that...we'd do it! Like most kids my age I had plenty of friends, but my closest pals were Eddy and Sonny. Eddy was a chunky kid and mastermind of many of our crazy adventures. He lived on the next floor up from me with his grandmother and uncle, which meant he could pull off more schemes than most kids and get away with them, too. Sonny, on the other hand, was a red-headed kid with a million freckles who spent more time in church than any kid we knew. When Sonny wasn't in church, he was usually with us, undoing whatever he learned in church.
Where we lived was called the "projects," because all the buildings, which were eight floors high and built exactly the same, were shaped like a huge half-square called Section A, B and C. If a kid stood in the courtyard of our unit, Section A was on his left, B in front of him and Section C on his right. Each section was connected in the basement by dark skinny hallways and tunnels that very few kids had ever seen with their own eyes. We used to dare one another to slowly creep down the last flight of stairs to the cellar, one step at a time, then peer around the corner to see if we could see anyone. The first time that I saw beyond the stairway, I saw a lot of gray, peeling paint on the walls, and the only light coming in was from a small dingy window near the top of the cellar wall. One thing that I did see clearly though was a long row of metal cages that went from the floor to the ceiling. Each cage had a door with a round lock and inside each cage I could faintly make out rows of something.... I don't know what..... about "this wide and this tall," hanging on the inside walls of the cages. If we heard a noise, anything thing at all, we'd turn and jet up those stairs and out into safety as fast as we could.
