FRANKLY SPEAKING

By Frank Crocitto

My Friend Rex

Rex was the dog downstairs. That’s what I remember. And you had to go downstairs to see him.
The cellar was a dark place. Even after you’d been there a bit and were supposed to get used to it and see better it still seemed unspeakably, invincibly dark. Rex was the king of this dark kingdom.
He was a police dog, a German shepherd. Those descriptions don’t fit the dog I remember. Rex scampered to me and he licked my face and rolled before me so that I could pat his belly. He loved me.
Supposedly he was my dog. So I never understood why he was kept in the basement. We had gotten him when we moved from Staten Island. I was nearly four at the time. Brooklyn, though geographically but a narrow stretch of water from the Island, was a foreign and forbidding country. Somebody gave him to us. I think it was the butcher next door.
The place we moved to was on 86th Street. In that part of Brooklyn, Dyker Heights, the streets were numbered. 86th Street, 85th Street, 84th Street, 83rd Street, 82nd Street, 81st Street—the street that we would eventually move to where my grandfather and grandmother lived, flanked by many relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, the street where I would grow into early manhood, the street where I learned most everything I needed to know in life and where my heart still beats among my oh so many friends, and a sky that has never been that sunny blue anywhere else. To me all the streets and avenues—which were also numbered, 12th Ave, 13th Avenue, 14th Ave, 15th Avenue—were unique, remarkably distinct from one another. But numbers are colorless things, except in the hands of Pythagoras.
The war had just begun when we moved. The War, the Great War, the Second World War, the war that was to pull us out of the depression. That year was not a boom year so my father, a child of the depression who wore the gray pall of it till his dying day, had to work long hours in a defense plant and on the side, print invitations to weddings and business cards and fix bicycles and rent them, too. He was a busy man. When he was off working, my mother, though she was big with child, had to lift the bicycles of anybody’s choice from the upper rack so they could pedal happy along the path that ran between the shore and the Belt Parkway.
There was a battery of small stores on the small block between 14th Ave and Bay 12th. On the corner was a gin mill called the 19th Hole because the golf links were nearby and then came a candy store and then the butcher shop and then our bicycle shop and then a tailor shop and then a grocery and at the Bay 12th corner there was a gasoline station. The stores were all attached, in some semblance of a Dutch style—Brooklyn having its origin in Dutchness; brick with low, quaint rooves.
Our bicycle shop did well, since people at the time did not generally own their own bikes, so when the weekend came all the top and bottom racks on both sides of our store were empty. When the weather was good—and it was often good in those days—and the weekend rolled around, the bicycle path by the shore drew people from Brooklyn as well as Staten Island, even though they had to take a ferry to get there. And my Uncle Vito was there, working on bicycles, too. He was my mother’s youngest brother who eventually was drafted and wound up on some bitterly cold, barren islands called the Aleutians for most of the war. Uncle Vito whose real name, though it was his nickname, was “Bates”, could fix anything. To this day he is the fix-it man in his neighborhood; he keeps the neighborhood going. Older with his mustached handsomeness and charm fading a little, he still gives the impression that he is bouncing his way through life and there are great days ahead.
Whatever went on in the store and in our small apartment behind the store I could always sense the presence of Rex in the basement. He barked sometimes, though not much and not enough. He must have slept a lot in his dark place. Sometimes, I thought I could hear him scampering around and sometimes I thought I could hear him breathing under the floorboards.
He was a puppy when we got him, and I guess that’s why we took him. He was small and cute and I suppose we all thought he would stay that way. But he did grow and he grew fast.
Now, as I look back I can’t imagine why we left that beautiful dog downstairs in a dark basement, except that my father was working practically all the time and my mother had the apartment and the store to take care of and all the cooking and cleaning and she was forming my little kid sister in her belly. And Bates was only there part-time because he worked on the ice truck with my grandfather and his brothers. And I was too small. Even though I was getting big and I thought myself pretty immense in my sailor suit or my dark blue coat and cap, Rex grew faster than me. He was too big for me to handle.
So many long days and nights in a dark cellar would make any living thing blind. That’s what it did to Rex. I cried when I learned he was blind. I wanted to see because I loved the light and I knew that Life is only what it is because of the light. The reality of his blindness was too crushing for me to have any energy left over to look for someone to pin blame on. Though you would think adults should know better, even when they are busy. I do remember that when I sneaked downstairs, which I wasn’t supposed to do, he remembered me anyway and he’d come racing over and throw himself at my feet.
I was as helpless before Rex’s blindness as I was before the news that we couldn’t take him with us to our new house on 81st Street. I said “no” many times and I wept and shouted through my tears but we had to give him away. My grandfather was probably the one who said that we couldn’t have him, probably because my grandmother didn’t want it. He showed how much he despised dogs by the way he kicked them.
After a long while I became convinced that no matter what I said or did Rex was going to be given away. He was a big, romping fellow and that was against him, as was his blindness. But he was a police dog and a notorious protector, and people who came around to visit us were sure he would get his eyesight back once he lived in the light awhile.
My cousin, Mikey (really my second cousin) eventually took Rex. Mikey was a huge guy with a round, pock-marked face and thick straight black hair who ran a butcher shop somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. He told me that Rex would be happy with all the bones and meat scraps he was going to get.
I didn’t understand at the time how I could live without Rex and how he was going to be able to live without me. Even if he had the best scraps of red meat in the world and he loped around where the fragrance of meat was ever in the air he was going to miss me, and he would be sad. Mikey put a leash around his neck and yanked him; Rex whimpered all the way towards his dark brown car. He opened the back door and pushed him in, and drove off.
Years later, how many I don’t know, we went to visit my Uncle Joe and family on 77th Street and Mikey was there, and Rex. He was big, very big and his bark was very deep and to my glad surprise he could see. And he came over to me and looked at me for a moment, uncertainly, and began to sniff me, and for a moment I thought he remembered me. He did, I’m sure of that. But he didn’t want to be sad too long, not after what he had been through. When Mikey called him he whirled around and went off and out the door and I never saw him again.
But I still remember him. I think—I hope—he remembers me.