THE SAGA OF THE FIVE DAY
MARATHON MONOPOLY GAME
It all started innocently enough on a steamy August afternoon. The town I called home, Athenia, New Jersey, was in the midst of a killer heat wave. For the past ten days the temperature and humidity hovered around the intolerable level, somewhere a little hotter then the inside of an open hearth furnace at a steel mill but a little cooler then the surface of the sun. They were the kind of days where a kid could work up a good sweat by just stirring a pitcher of Kool Aid or by scratching his prickly heat. In fact, every morning I was discovering new patches of rash erupting in nooks and crannies that I didn’t even know I had, and I was quickly developing some creative ways to scratch them.
The oppressive, stifling, suffocating heat continued tediously day after day. The street tar bubbled up in the gutter, birds listlessly clung to tree branches, too hot to chirp. Our neighbor’s dog, a mean mongrel of unknown ancestry except that we were sure that he was at least part timber wolf, hunkered down in a dirt hole he had dug under the tool shed and refused to come out even when taunted by Mrs. Babula’s tabby or the water company meter reader.
In our house the temperature soared. Our only relief from the mind-numbing heat was one table-top fan that my father moved from room to room to try to cool us off. It oscillated back and forth, and when you were in direct contact with the breeze it gave off, you were refreshed, but only until the thing swung in the opposite direction. Then you were once again unbearably uncomfortable.
My mother, a great cook who enjoyed preparing tasty meals and other goodies, had virtually shut down our kitchen for the duration because turning on even one gas burner to boil an egg elevated the heat in there to a level that practically melted the paint on the walls. For more than a week our family suppers consisted of things like tuna salad, cold meat platters and cheese sandwiches. My father pleaded for just one fried pork chop or a meat loaf, but my mother refused. “Do you want me to get heat stroke?” she would ask him sarcastically. I silently wondered to myself if I would taste my mother’s sauerkraut and kielbasy soup ever again.
My father’s favorite sobriate to try to put a positive spin on the situation was, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” To which my mother would respond, “It’s ninety-nine degrees in here! IT’S THE HEAT!”
That’s how hot it was. At times you became almost certain that you couldn’t stand it any longer
Along with the heat came boredom, which could only lead to trouble. Just last week my older brother Bob and his friend Andy, in an effort to relieve the summer stupor, had perpetrated a harmless prank that almost escalated into the crime of the century. The target of their shenanigans was old man Czykulski who lived next to the empty lot behind St. Stanilaus church, where we all played baseball. Mr. Czykulski was an ornery old cuss who seemed to be offended by anyone having any kind of fun. Living next to our sandlot field, he was always complaining about our boisterous activity, even calling the cops to complain about our ball being hit into his yard. One sultry night, Bob and Andy pilfered the decorative chrome ball and ceramic stand that stood in the middle of Czykulski’s front lawn. They hid the things behind some large arborvitae along the side of the church which was right across the street. The next morning, finding his precious lawn ornament gone, old man Czykulski went bezerk, standing in front of his home wildly raging and loudly ranting about the local, young hooligans and thugs who had no respect for property or veterans of The World War. He called the police who dutifully responded and tried to calm him down. They told him that it was probably just a prank. But Czykulski would not be calmed. After the police left, he continued to rant to his neighbors who had come outside to see what the commotion was about, but he got no sympathy from them since he had never been a pleasant neighbor. He wouldn’t give up. He went door to door on our street and the next demanding that the parents of neighborhood kids interrogate, cajole and threaten their children to turn in the guilty party. But he was up against a code of silence. When he came to our house and began to berate my mother at the front door, accusing her of harboring a fugitive, my father quickly leapt up and took over the situation telling Czykulski that he should be more concerned with people than things and slammed the door in his face.
Two days later, Father Felix was on his way from the rectory to the church in order to hear Saturday confessions, when he spied the missing objects behind the bushes. When he sent the church caretaker to Czykulski’s front door to tell him where to find his valued possession., the grouch insisted that it be brought to him, which the caretaker refused to do. So Czykulski had to retrieve the items by himself, struggling with the heavy ceramic stand. But he never put it back on his front lawn.
And so it came to be, on a particular Wednesday in late August, the combination of the heat and summer boredom made it the kind of day where even the most school-hating fourteen year old would begin to admit to himself that he just might be looking forward to the reopening of school. Anything that would relieve the insistent monotony of the screeching katydids was welcome and I shamefully admit that I was the one who suggested to my group of friends, in an effort to enliven our boredom-drenched existence, that we play a game of Monopoly.
I had allowed my young life to be seduced by the greedy, avaricious, insatiable lure of Monopoly, and was eager to start up a game with my friends. But I had no idea at the time that we were about to embark on a game that would last five days. That’s right, five days. And that was long before anyone had every heard of telephone booth stuffing or hot dog eating contests. If the Guinness Book of World Records had been around then, my friends and I would surely be listed there.
Monopoly is a simple real estate board game with play money and dice that originated during the tough economic times of the Great Depression. It was the perfect game for that era. You can take away a man’s job, foreclose on his home, and even repossess his heavily financed his table-model Atwater Kent radio, but you can’t repossess a man’s dreams. That’s what made, and still makes the game of Monopoly so popular. An unemployed machinist or insurance salesman could set himself down in front of that colorful game board and forget the real world of creditors and unpaid bills. For a few hours he could be a real estate tycoon, an entrepreneur, wheeling and dealing with sums of money that would cause even John D. Rockefeller to suffer anxious moments. A person didn’t have to pinch pennies with Monopoly money. He could throw around fifty, one hundred and even five hundred dollar bills with the careless abandon of Donald Trump or Warren Buffet. If he was successful in wiping out his opponents by obtaining total control of the game board, a person could proudly pat himself on the back and lament that it was only the hard times that was keeping him from attaining true riches. On the other hand, the game contained enough of an element of chance that if a player is wiped out, he could blame his financial demise on the unlucky roll of the dice. The game of Monopoly was a celebration of American capitalism.
The idea had come to me the previous night while my family and I were gathered in our parlor around our Philco console radio listening to the Fibber McGee and Molly program. This was my mother’s favorite radio show, and it was a must in our house. Mom had few things that she could call her own, since almost everything she did was for me or my brother or dad. But this was hers.
Every Tuesday night she would hurry through the supper dishes so that by eight o’clock she was comfortably settled in her easy chair with her crocheting bag in her lap and our Philco’s tubes nice and warm and tuned to WOR, the Fibber and Molly station in New York City.
“Don’t be annoying me now,” she would warn my brother and me. “Its only five minutes to the Johnson Wax Program and I haven’t got time for your shenanigans.” My mother always referred to the show by its official name, “The Johnson Wax Program.”
The Fibber McGee and Molly show was a simple, easy-going radio program of gentle humor. Every episode revolved around the irrepressible Fibber, a retired vaudevillian, and his attempt to perform some simple task, such as hanging a picture on the wall, trimming his apple tree or taking down the window screens. Or sometimes he would be embarking on some grand mission such as writing a mystery novel, taking up pipe smoking or growing a mustache. The writers of the show could create thirty minutes of laughter from something as simple as the couple looking for a parking space in downtown Wistful Vista, their hometown, or writing out their Christmas cards. Fibber’s boastful bravado always made more of the job then it actually was, but whatever the situation, Molly was at Fibber’s side with gentle encouragement.
Fibber’s activity was always interrupted by a succession of colorful characters that either lent advice on how to do the job, or provided pointed ribbing of McGee and his puffed-up ego. Characters such as Mrs. Carstairs, the stuffy socialite; La Trivia, the mayor of Wistful Vista; and Wallace Wimple, the henpecked neighborhood milquetoast all contributed to the hilarious mayhem that kept mom and all other listeners chuckling for thirty relaxing minutes.
Mom loved that program, and she especially loved Harlow Wilcox, the show’s announcer and official spokesman for Johnson Wax.
“He sounds like such a nice young man,” Mom would often say.
Harlow would introduce the day’s situation to the audience at the beginning of the show, and then show up in the middle to sneakily work a commercial for Johnson Wax into the plot. Mom showed her love for Harlow, or “Waxy”, as Fibber called him, by patronizing the sponsor to the maximum.
Johnson Wax products came in three forms, paste, cream and liquid and my mother kept an ample supply of all three types in the cabinet under her kitchen sick. She faithfully used the stuff all over the house. She applied it to not only the hardwood floor in our upstairs hall, but also to the red and blue squares of our kitchen linoleum. She rubbed it on all of our windowsills to protect them from rain, the cabinet of our parlor radio, the wooden armrests on her favorite easy chair, the stairway railing, the kitchen counters, the dining room table and even on the family’s one leather suitcase that we all called a valise.
One time, when Harlow suggested to listeners that Johnson Wax could also be applied to the fireplace mantle to protect it from soot and grime, Mom let her crochet- work fall to her lap as she stared wistfully into space and sighed aloud, “I’ve always dreamed of having a cozy fireplace and a nice oak mantle with a sparkling Johnson Wax gleam.”
On the particular night in question, the simple plot of the program revolved around McGee trying to find someone to play a game of Monopoly with him. Molly refused because, she said, “We’ll be playing until the Dodgers win a World Series.” That was an extremely unlikely occurrence.
Then began the parade of off-beat characters to the McGee front door, but McGee’s cajoling could not convince any of them to join him in a game. All protested that the game would go on way too long.
That was the seed of an idea that grew. So the following afternoon, in a fit of ennui, I suggested to my friends, Chuck and Duke that we engage in a friendly game of Monopoly. Little did I know that I was initiating a series of events that would have far reaching repercussions.
Our usual monopoly group consisted of Chuck, Duke, Boz
, Zee and me. But Zee wasn’t around because he had been packed and shipped off
to his grandfather’s farm in rural Pennsylvania for the entire month of August.
We could have played with just three, but Monopoly really requires at least
four players to make the wheeling and dealing interesting. So we recruited
Stanley Mieszko.
Mieszko was not a full-time regular member of our gang. He was one of those kids who drifted in and out of our group. Sometimes he’d hang around with us for days or weeks as a time, but then he’d disappear and we wouldn’t see him at all for an equally long time. Then he’d show up again and get right back into the swing of our latest activities like he had never been away. Lately he had been hanging around with us so it was a natural that he be the fourth in our game.
Mieszko lived only one block over on Grunwald Street, but he was one of those kids whose house we never went to. He always came over to Penobscot Street to hang out with us. Mieszko was interesting because he always seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at the establishment long before there were such people as bohemians, beatniks, or hippies. When the rest of use all longed for fancy Schwinn bicycles with chrome fenders and a glossy paint job, Mieszko had other ideas. He stripped down a decrepit bike handed down to him from his older brother. He removed the fenders and the basket and sanded the rusty frame down to bare metal, then painted the whole thing, including handlebars and wheels, a dull black. Then he gave it a name, The Shadow, after the mysterious lead character in his favorite radio program.
Mieszko had dark blonde hair that he meticulously kept swept back from the crown of his forehead in a impressive mound. He had cobalt blue eyes that were as clear and sharp as a cats. He kept his chin out and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smirky grin, as if he knew something that no one else did. He spoke in a slow deliberate style with the hint of a Polish accent. He didn’t chase girls, girls chased him.
He was also a risk-taker who would do things that the rest of us considered outrageous or dangerous. Like he time he got a Mohawk haircut.
It is written in the annals of Athenia history that the day it happened was a typically frigid February afternoon. The school day had torturously progressed to its long-awaited conclusion and the final dismissal bell at school 13 clanged mercifully at three fifteen. The school doors exploded open and a roistering rabble of elementary school lemmings spewed onto the streets of Athenia, free at last. The day was cold and gray, like most February days in Athenia. Tiny pellet-like snowflakes were falling out of the low, pewter-colored sky as a typically fiendish North Jersey wind swirled and buffeted them into our faces, stinging our cheeks like pin pricks. It was as if some sadistic giant had turned over our Athenia snow globe and was shaking it with all his might. Duke, Boz and I tucked our heads deep into our coat collars for protection against the elements and resolutely set off on our fourteen-block, up-hill trek along Van Houten Avenue toward our homes.
As shuffled along silently up the avenue, the snow fell even harder and faster. It was so cold that the snowflakes didn’t even adhere to the ground. They just hit the street pavement, bounced a little and then were picked up by the whoosh of passing traffic and sent into mad, whirling spirals along the blacktop, like sand grains across a stormy desert.
Finally, after two blocks of frigid silence, Duke made an observation.
“This is shitty packing snow. You can’t make snowballs with it. It’s too dry.”
Boz and I grunted in agreement. That’s all that we had to say to each other on a day like this. If this had been earlier in the winter, the sight of a falling snow and it’s prospect of building up to a significant accumulation would have excited us. A day off from school with sledding and snowball fights were a welcome diversion in December and January, but by late February, we had been through so many freeze-thaw cycles that trudging our way through layer upon layer of slush and ice left us unimpressed with yet another annoying snowstorm. At this point, we just wanted winter to be over.
We had sloughed past the countless taverns, liquor stores and other businesses on Van Houten Avenue and had almost reached Penobscot Street, where we turned for home. But our journey was interrupted by congestion on the sidewalk. A group of sniveling peers was milling around the front of Sal’s Barber Shop, their faces turned to the shop window, awash in the warm yellow glow that flowed from there.
“What’s going on?” Duke asked one of the multitudes.
“Mieszko is getting a Mohawk haircut,” the kid answered, wiping his runny nose on the back of his mitten.
“A Mohawk?”
“Ya know, like the Indians.”
I knew what a Mohawk haircut was. I had seen the pictures in our history book; I think it was in the section about the French and Indian War. The haircut consisted of having everything shaved to the skin except for a narrow strip of hair running from the center of the forehead to the base of the skull in back. This was not the kind of haircut one saw everyday in Athenia.
“How come?” Duke asked
“It’s a bet,” the kid told us. “John Habroleski and Joe Kozoleski bet Mieszko a dollar that he wouldn’t do it.”
John and Joe were high-school instigators who were known for making life miserable for any kids smaller, younger, or smarter then them. And that included most of the kid population of Athenia.
“Is he really going to do it?” Duke asked.
We moved closer to the window of Sal’s and peered in. Sure enough, there was Mieszko sitting in the chair with Sal running the electric shears all the way across his scalp, front to back, while the two trouble-makers stood nearby watching and grinning their evil grins.
Mieszko got the Mohawk haircut that day, and won his dollar. But he caught holy hell when he got home. His mother promptly dragged him back to Sal’s, and after giving the barber a piece of her mind, she made the rueful Italian shave the rest of Mieszko’s head to remove the Mohawk strip of hair.
But that wasn’t the end of problems for Mieszko, because when he showed up completely bald at school the next morning, his shocked teacher, Miss Breeman, immediately marched him to the principal’s office, where Mr. Schwitzer just as promptly suspended him and sent him home.
But all of these tribulations rolled off of Mieszko’s back. He was let back into school the next morning, after his mother had exchanged a few choice words with Mr. Schwitzer, who then turned his wrath on John and Joe, the instigators, and suspended them until their parents came in for a talking-to.
After that, the boy population of the school looked upon Mieszko with admiration for standing up to not only the local bullies, but also our principal who ruled School 13 with an iron fist.
And the girls, instead of being repulsed by Mieszko’s smooth pate, seemed to be attracted to it. This was especially incredible since his chief asset had always been his magnificent head of hair. Even shaving it all off, down to his pale, shiny pate did not lessen his attraction of the female of the species. No matter what he did or where he went, or what he said, he seemed to attract girls. Wherever he went, girls would show up. They just wanted to be around him. And that’s another reason we liked him hanging around with us, since none of us could attract any girls on our own.
So Mieszko became a part of our Monopoly game that sultry August afternoon.
Our game started pretty much like the dozens of other Monopoly games we’d played before. We spread the board out on the floor of Chuck’s front porch which was shaded by two huge horse chestnut trees at curbside, and began to choose tokens. That’s when the first hint of trouble appeared. As I think back on it now, I realize that maybe we should have quit then and there.
Duke and Chuck argued over who would get to use the racing car token. Duke was annoyingly insistent that he be allowed to use it since he always chose the racing car. He was also annoying because he always made car noises as he moved the car around the board. “Vrooooom, vroooom.” He would go. And then when he reached the end of the move, he would screech to stop. “Eeeeeeeeeeek!” We all hated when he did that, and he did it all the time.
Chuck’s argument was totally converse, “You’re always using the racing car. This time let somebody else us it.” They argued back and forth until the matter was finally settled when Chuck allowed whiney Duke to use it for the fee of fifty Monopoly dollars. Duke gladly paid it. He was very superstitious and wouldn’t play at all unless the racing car was his token. Chuck settled for the cannon since I had already chosen the battleship and Mieszko had taken the man on a rearing horse that he insisted was the Lone Ranger and his faithful horse Silver.
Normally, a game of Monopoly meant just playing for a few hours, moving pieces around the colorful board, buying and trading until a majority of the players succumbed to boredom and begged for the game to be over. Then we’d each count up our cash plus the value of our assets and declare the player who had accumulated the greatest wealth to be the winner. It was usually Duke. He seemed to have a knack for the game, and for handling money.
And so it began. I threw the highest roll of the dice and got to go first. My first roll of the game was a double two and I moved the four spaces to Income Tax. Nailed right off the bat! I paid ten percent of my initial fifteen hundred dollars; then, because I had rolled a double, I rolled again. THREE. I landed on Chance and drew a card, “Go Back Three Spaces.” That took me back to Income Tax and I was forced to pay another ten percent of my remaining funds. What a start! I was barely out of the starting gate and already I was down and trailing the others. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the very same fate that would control the rest of my financial life.
The game went on and in almost no time we had each managed to acquire a few holdings. Money was already rapidly changing hands to pay rents and make new purchases. After a few more circuits of the board, all properties except the Waterworks and Ventnor Avenue were owned by one of us.
That’s when the horse-trading began as we each looked to see who owned what, and what kind of deals could be made to create the coveted monopolies.
My greedy goal was to own everything along the one side of the board between Jail and Free Parking. I figured that this was the most frequently traveled section of the board since it was visited by so many prisoners who had been just sprung from the jail. By sheer luck I already owned the Electric Company, New York Avenue in the orange monopoly, and States Avenue in the violet monopoly along with several less important holdings around the board. I decided to concentrate first on acquiring the oranges, meaning that I would have to deal with Duke for St. James Place and Mieszko to get Tennessee Avenue. It was best to avoid doing any dealing with Duke since I knew from previous experience that he was an extraordinarily tough bargainer.
I started by making an offer to Mieszko, which he rejected. He made a counter offer which I rejected. Negotiations went back and forth until finally a deal was struck. In the meantime, Chuck and Duke had consummated an agreement of their own, and things were flowing along smoothly with each of us holding monopolies and starting to add buildings to our real estate.
Each of us had our own method for holding onto and keeping track of our finances. I preferred to keep my Monopoly money sorted into neat little piles by denomination, will all the piles tucked one end under my side of the game board. I kept the white one-dollar notes to the left and progressed to the coveted gold five hundred dollar notes on the extreme right. Whenever I managed to accumulate more then 2 or 3 of those high value bills, I would hide the rest completely under the board so that other players wouldn’t know how well off I was. Chuck, on the other hand, kept his money in a disorganized heap in front of him, always having to search through them to pay bills. Mieszko always held his money stack in his left hand, never getting it out of his grip, and Duke kept his in the breast pocket of his shirt.
In no time we had all become avaricious money-grabbing capitalist pigs, but Duke was the most serious game player. He treated his Monopoly money like it was real. He’d crouch over the game board watching us move around the perimeter with greed-crazed eyes waiting for us to land on his properties. And when we did, he would triumphantly announce how much rent we owned without even referring to the deed card. He had all of his rents memorized. It was a surprise to me that he never became a banker, but he did get caught and suffered financially in the Wall Street sub-prime mortgage scandal years later.
The afternoon hours zoomed by quickly. Our only break came when Chuck’s mother, a nice lady who always called Chuck “Charles,” and who referred to us as “you nice boys,” brought us a pitcher of cherry Kool Ade to quench our thirst.
Then when the whistle at the propeller plant blew at 4:30 to mark the end of the day shift, we interrupted our game for supper, but returned afterwards to play some more. Before we knew it the sun had made it’s daily circuit across the sky and was beginning its descent into the west as an orange ball. The temperature had cooled down to almost the high eighties, and the game broke up for the day. We all took off for our homes, but we left the game board set up on Chuck’s porch floor and agreed to come back tomorrow to continue the game. For security reasons, we each took our Monopoly money and deed cards home with us.
Early the Thursday morning, I was sitting on the curb in front of Chuck’s house, under the cooling shade of the street trees, eager to recommence the game. The suffocating heat had not abated. It was not even nine o’clock yet and the insistent striating of the cicada already filled the air. The only other people out were a couple of Polish ladies who had just come out of the 8 o’clock mass at St. Stanilaus’s church and were animatedly gossiping in their native tongue on the corner. In spite of the heat, their heads were wrapped in babushkas.
While waiting for the other players, I idly scratched at bites on the back of my neck that I had acquired during the night from a particularly sadistic Jersey mosquito that had buzzed in my ear all night.
I was there for only a short time when I heard the squeaky hinges and slam of Chuck’s screen door and his chopping footsteps coming down his front stairs. At the same time, Duke emerged from his house next door, still gnawing on a piece of his breakfast toast, and Mieszko could be seen coming over Mrs. Malic’s back fence as he made his usual shortcut through backyards from his house on Grunwald Street. We exchanged greetings, and then, in a business-like manner, we went back to our game on Chuck’s porch.
The dice rolled, the silver tokens moved around the colorful gameboard, and Monopoly money exchanged hands feverishly. By lunchtime Mieszko had sold a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card to Duke for five hundred dollars, and I was put into a cash-poor condition as the result of a Community Chest card that instructed me to pay an assessment for street repairs at the rate of forty dollars per house and one hundred fifteen dollars per hotel.
After a break for lunch, I managed to make a slight recovery, collecting $950 from Duke once and Chuck twice when they landed on my St James Place with a hotel. By mid-afternoon, things were humming along for all of us again.
Our play was punctuated with amiable chatting about various subjects that concerned adolescent boys at that time. Like, did Mr. Belaqueva, our gym teacher wear a wig, and are Miss Bajor’s tits real or are they falsies, and do girls take off their bras when they sleep.
“No way.” Duke said. “They have to keep it one. It hurts to have them things swinging around.”
“It would be like wearing your shoes to bed.” I disagreed.
None of us had a sister, so we had no way of knowing the truth, until Mieszko confidently cleared up the question by saying curtly, “They take them off.”
When Duke challenged him, asking, “How do you know?” Mieszko, without interrupting a counting of his Monopoly money, answered, “I just know.”
Boz and I nodded knowingly to acknowledge that Mieszko knew what he was talking about in matters such as this.
We also discussed our favorite radio shows, and shared our fantasies of what we would each do if we had the power to cloud men’s minds and make ourselves invisible like The Shadow.
The Shadow, was a weekly melodramatic radio show and Mieszkos favorite. The Shadow was Lamont Cranston, a man of wealth who had learned the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so that they could not see him. Each week he would use that power to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. The Shadow was never seen, only heard as he plied his crime-busting skills. The only person who knew to whom the voice of the invisible Shadow belonged, was Margo Lane, Cranston’s lovely friend and companion.
Duke’s response was expected, “I’d walk into a bank and take all the money.”
Chuck said, “I’d kick Old Man Schweitzer in the rear end.” Mr. Schweitzer was our principal at school 13 and Chuck had been sent to his office more then once or twice.
I said, “I’d walk into the girl’s changing room at gym time.” I had a secret crush for Polly Cutler and a deep desire to know everything about her.
“What would you do?” I asked Mieszko.
He didn’t have to
think., his answer was the obvious. “I’d be a crime-buster. Solving mysteries
and catching bad guys, like The Shadow.”
As the gloaming approached that evening, the shadows grew long and deep and lightening bugs blinked their ritualistic mating call. So we broke up our game for the day, agreeing to reconvene again the next morning for another day of capitalistic competition.
Friday dawned as hot and humid as ever. My mother told my brother and me that John Gambling, the morning radio host on WOR, advised that the heat wave would continue unabated through the weekend, with no sign of relief until maybe Sunday or Monday.
Undaunted, the four of us met again that morning on Chuck’s front porch and restarted our game for the third day. But by mid-morning, boredom had set in. That’s when Chuck proposed that we quit, count up our funds and declare a winner. I was willing to go along with that, but Duke and Mieszko objected vehemently. Duke had an alternate plan. He suggested that we spice up the game by changing some of the rules. So we went to the “double hotels” rule that Duke made up, where, after you add a hotel to a property, you can still add more houses and work your way up to a second hotel. The rents would increase to the hotel rate plus the rent of however many additional house you have on it, all the way up to double hotel rent. That meant that if Duke, who owned Boardwalk, was able to work his way up to a second hotel, any unlucky sap who landed there would have to shell out four thousand dollars in rent. We also increased the payout for passing GO to five hundred dollars. This reinvigorated our enthusiasm and play became fun again.
That afternoon we had two visitors.
I was about to roll the dice when I looked up and saw the two of them approaching. It was the two most popular girls in School Thirteen, Rose Loomis and Polly Cutler. I stopped in mid-dice-throw when I saw them. Duke was busily engrossed in counting his money…again…so I elbowed him to get his attention. He looked up, annoyed that I had interrupted his financial audit, but when he saw the two his jaw dropped.
“What are they doing on our street?” He asked me. Both of them lived on the other side of the school, so it was a rarity for them to be seen on Penobscot Street.
“I dunno.” I answered without taking my eyes off of Polly, my secret fantasy girlfriend and the object of my daydreams and night dreams as well.
Polly was cute and pert and sweet and infinitely desirable. I gazed at her approaching loveliness. Her hair was long and the color of cinnamon. It was pulled neatly back into a ponytail that pertly swooped upward before cascading down, with its delicate ends brushing against the nape of her swan-like neck. It was tied in place by a small silky scarf that was the color of buttercups and it swooshed provocatively from side to side with each movement of her pretty head. Her face was round and soft with large brown eyes, rosy cheeks, a delicate nose and full pouty lips that turned up more on one side when she smiled, sort of like Veronica Lake. She was wearing a simple bright yellow cotton dress that was fresh and cool despite the oppressing heat of the mid-afternoon sun. She was carrying her pure white tennis sneakers dangling from the dainty fingers of her left hand. Her feet were bare, and I could see a delicate, plain gold chain snuggly caressing her left ankle. Oh, that I could be that chain!
My crush for Polly went way back to our first day in kindergarten, and since then, every time I saw her, there would be a churning disturbance deep within my gut. A roiling maelstrom that would rise inside of me and cause my heart to race, my palms to sweat, and my ears to ring. And lately, seeing her would also provoke a startling physical manifestation that proved I was no longer a boy, but had passed into manhood. But to my self-loathing chagrin, I had yet to have the courage to act on my secret desires.
Rose was different. Her aura was more flashy and earthy in a Lizabeth Scott sort of way. With soft, wavy curls of lemony hair cascading to her shoulders and sumptuous red lips, she was erotic, sensuous, mysterious and voluptuous. Her skin was smooth and flawless and her deep and limpid blue-gray eyes promised more than any mere fourteen-year-old boy could imagine. She exuded an aura that invited adolescent fantasies of debauchery.
She was wearing a loose-fitting cotton shirt and blue jeans with the cuffs turned up exposing her well-turned ankles. On the left hip pocket of the jeans, just below the belt-line, a large flowery letter R was elaborately embroidered in pink thread.
Rose was new to Athenia. She had moved here less then two years ago with her family when her father was transferred from Buffalo, New York to Athenia to be the new head of security at the propeller plant.
As the girls came closer, I could see that they were deeply engaged in a pretend conversation. It was obvious that they were attempting to ignore us. As they passed by, Mieszko had the confidence, courage and audacity to sarcastically call out to them, “Don’t say hello.”
With that, they both stopped and looked back.
“What are you two doing here?” Mieszko boldly asked them.
Rose answered, “Walking.”
“Walking where?”
“Just walking.”
“Come over here.” Mieszko demanded. Chuck and I looked at each other. Neither one of us would have had the nerve to talk to any girl like that.
“Why?”
“You’re standing in the sun. It’s hot. Come over here in the shade.”
Rose
took a few steps toward us and Polly followed.
“What are you doing?” Polly asked. She seemed to be looking at me with that lemon-twist smile. Was she talking to ME?
My throat was dry and I tried to clear it to answer her, but Mieszko beat me to it. “What’s it look like we’re doing? We’re playing Monopoly.” He said with a tone of playful sarcasm.
“I have a Monopoly game.” Rose said. “I don’t like it.”
Mieszko held his hand out with the dice, toward her. “Here. Roll them for me.”
Rose looked at him skeptically but then took the final few steps toward us and extended her hand. Mieszko dropped the dice into it.
“I could use a little luck.” He told her.
Polly had moved closer too and was standing right next to me. Her yellow frock briefly brushed up against my arm. My heart did a flip.
Without hesitation Rose shook the dice in her fist and, bending over, skillfully released them onto the game board rolling a seven.
Mieszko moved his horse and rider token the seven spaces landing on Community Chest.
“Go ahead. Pick a card for me.” He told her, and Rose reached and picked the top card.
Without prompting she read it aloud. “ Bank error in your favor. Collect two hundred dollars.”
“All right!” Mieszko ejaculated. “You’re my good luck charm. Hang around.”
The girls looked at each other and without discussion sat down on the porch steps. Polly sat so close to me that I could smell the Cashmere Bouquet soap she had used this morning. Her pretty feet were right there on the porch step next to my dirty Keds, and I could see that her delicate toes were painted a sensuous shade of pink. I had never had an opinion about the color pink before that, but that day it became my favorite. My heart practically leaped out of my chest.
Chuck, Duke and I traded looks. We all knew that this was a monumentous occasion. Two girls, not just any girls, but two of the most popular girls at school, maybe in our entire Athenia neighborhood, were sitting here with us. This is something that never, ever would have happened if Mieszko hadn’t been here with us.
My turn came next, and in an unprecedented moment of uncharacteristically bold, fearless, audacious bravery I invited Polly to roll the dice for me.
“Sure.” She said smiling at me. At ME! With that one word and smile, a tsunami of excitement rushed through my gut and crashed onto the shore of my heart, overwhelming it. I could barely contain my joy. An electrifying tingle rushed from my fingertips to my toes when I handed her the dice and my hand touched hers.
She deftly rolled an eight, and then asked. “Can I move your token too? Which is it?”
“The battleship.” I croaked. And she moved me the eight spaces, counting each one out loud. My token landed on Kentucky Avenue owned by Duke with a hotel. I happily counted out $1,050 to pay the rent. Happy because Polly had touched my battleship and all was right with the world.
So for the rest of the afternoon, the girls settled in and Rose rolled the dice for Mieszko and Polly rolled for me. Duke was unimpressed and upset because the girls had slowed down the game. Every time it came Mieszko’s turn to roll the dice, there was a pause in the action because he was in a distracted conversation with Rose.
“Roll the dice already, will ya.” Duke would complain in an annoyed tone.
Chuck had been struck speechless in the company of the two girls and mostly just kept his head down and rearranged his Deed cards in front of him, over and over.
Meanwhile, I had become bold and charming and did my best to engage in clever banter with Polly about various mutual interests, like the coming school year, the teachers that we hated or the ones that we liked or the ones we thought were weird.
Whenever I could, I would surreptitiously sneak a peek at her pretty pink toes.
I even put her in charge of my money, collecting rents when they were due, and paying out when necessary. She had brought me good luck because with her dice-rolling and token-moving, the great cosmic scale began to tip in my favor. Duke, Chuck and Mieszko had all landed on my Park Place property with a hotel that afternoon and filled my coffers with their rent money.
The afternoon passed by in what seemed like an instant, but eventually Rose noted that it was approaching suppertime and suggested that they had to get going. Polly slipped her lovely feet into her sneakers and with friendly goodbyes they took off down Penobscot Street toward their homes.
Chuck told us that he wouldn’t be able to play after supper because he had to go to an archery competition in Parsippany with his father who was an amateur competitor. So we decided to just reconvene the next morning.
Mieszko gave a hasty, “See ya tomorrow,” to us, and jumped up to run after the girls. I saw him catch up to them and engage in animated talk with Rose. I figured that he was just putting on some of his Mieszko charm.
Meanwhile, I practically floated down Penobscot Street to my house, still in a state of euphoria over my intimate encounter with the girl of my dreams.
The next morning, Saturday, was day four of our marathon Monopoly game and another hot one, Chuck had to go shopping that morning with his mother in downtown Passaic for new clothes for the coming school year, and I went with my father to see a friend of his in Garfield who has a two-tone green Buick for sale. My father kicked the tires and took it for a spin, but decided that it wasn’t right for our family. It was a two-door and dad was looking for a four-door.
“Besides,” Dad said to me, “I don’t like green.”
So it wasn’t until after lunch that we got together, but we were forced to move our game location because Mr. Yarmchuk had decided that he was going to scrape and paint the porch floor. So we moved to Chuck’s backyard, which consisted mostly of hard-packed dirt with occasional bits of scrubby grass. But in the corner of the property there stood a big old apple tree with branches that spread low and wide providing ample cooling shade and a patch of soft green grass. We set the game board down on the ground under it and took our positions around it.
We resumed play. Dice were rolled, tokens were moved, money changed hands and an occasional disagreement erupted. In other words, things were going along as usual when I looked up and saw Rose, alone, strolling down Chuck’s driveway.
“ Why is she back here?” I wondered, but Mieszko seemed to be expecting her.
“Be right back.” He said as he got up with his Monopoly money still in his hand and went to meet her before she got all the way into Chuck’s yard.
They spoke briefly then walked up the driveway toward the front of the house.
“Hey where you going?” Chuck shouted to them.
“I said ‘I’ll be right back.’” Mieszko shouted back.
“Ask her where’s Polly.” I shouted, but I don’t think he heard me.
So Chuck took his turn, then I took mine, but then we had to wait for Mieszko to come back because it was his turn.
Finally he returned alone. “What was that about?” Chuck asked.
“She had to tell me something.” Mieszko’s answered.
“Where is she?” Chuck asked.
“She had to go.” answered Mieszko .
“Did you ask her about Polly?” I asked eagerly.
“She said Polly had piano lessons.”
“Can we just get back to playing the game now.” Duke pleaded.
We played until Chuck’s mother called him in for supper, so we broke up deciding to try to resume on Sunday.
Day five, Sunday, dawned hotter then ever. Duke and I were alter boys and had to go to St. Stan’s to serve nine o’clock mass. It was questionable if we would be playing that day since all of us frequently had family commitments, but by two o’clock we all showed up in Chuck’s yard and resumed our game.
We had been playing for only a short time when Duke pointed out that the sky was staring to darken. Also a refreshing breeze had whipped up. But we played on.
Mieszko, who had seemed to be short of cash yesterday, had the misfortune of landing on Chuck’s Park Place property with two hotels on it. The rent was $3,000, a considerable sum.
Chuck grinned, thinking that this would surely bankrupt Mieszko and finally one of us would be out of the game.
We were all astonished when Mieszko pulled six golden five hundred dollar Monopoly money bills out of his left hand and dropped them in front of Chuck.
Chuck’s jaw dropped. “Where’d you get that money from?’ Chuck demanded to know.
“I had it.” He said dryly.
“No you didn’t”
“It’s mine.” Mieszko said calmly.
Chuck was getting more agitated and I was also wondering where it came from.
Meanwhile, the sky was becoming increasingly dark, transitioning from gray to black. There were a few distant claps of thunder.
We went back to the game and silently took our turns. The question of Mieszko’s new found fortune hung in the air, unanswered, until Chuck’s face suddenly lit up as a thought dawned on him.
“Did you get that money from Loomis?” He asked Mieszko accusingly.
“Yea,” joined in Duke. “She said yesterday that she had a Monopoly game.”
It was becoming evident that Mieszko and Rose were in cahoots.
“You did! You got the money from her!” said Chuck loudly. His remark was accented by a nearby crack of lightening.
“Nah, I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”
“You wanna search me?” Mieszko taunted. “Come on. I dare you.”
There was more distant thunder and lightening, but both seemed to be approaching rapidly. The sky was darkening even more, and the wind was becoming more violent. The tree branches above us were now swaying madly and shook off some unripe apples that fell to the ground around us.
“You don’t think I will?” retorted Chuck.
“No, I don’t. Come on, Do it.” Meiszko challenged.
Ominous low, black clouds were now overhead and it was almost as dark as night. The streetlight in front of Chuck’s house had come on.
“You’re cheating!” Chuck boldly accused.
“Am not.”
“Are too.” Chuck shouted, and with that he lunged at Mieszko, grabbed him around the torso and pushed him to the ground.
The two rolled around in the dirt, grappling at each other wildly when rain began to fall in splattering plops. It was sparse at first, but then became more and more intense until it was a deluge punctuated by a bone-rattling blast of thunder.
That got us all moving, including Chuck and Mieszko, and we all hastily retreated to Chuck’s back porch, leaving behind everything; the board, the hotels, houses, token, even our money. We arrived drenched.
Now the rain was pounding down like we were at the base of Niagara Falls. It was a sheet of grayness and we could barely see Chuck’s father’s Studebaker sitting in the driveway.
Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting boom of thunder that shook the porch under us, and a simultaneous tremendous, blinding flash of light that was brighter then anything I had ever seen before, or since. It was like a thousand suns had come together overhead for a nanosecond, and then madly crashed into Chuck’s backyard. I felt my teeth vibrate. There was a loud crackling sound that caused us all to instinctively cover our ears. At the same instant, our bodies were buffeted by a blast of supercharged energy that that caused us all to reel wildly. My heart seemed to stop dead in my chest, and my body felt like a million pinpricks had assaulted me all at once from the inside out, like I had swallowed electricity. My eyeglasses were pulled from my face and flew backward over my head. I found them later in the driveway on the other side of the Studebaker. My skin was taunt and tingly like one massive goose bump. My hair felt warm on the top of my head. My pompadour, that I had meticulously Brylcreemed that morning, was in chaotic disarray and there was a metallic taste in my mouth.
Chuck’s father burst through the back door with his paintbrush still in his hand. “What the hell was that?” He gasped.
We all looked at him in stunned, dumbfounded silence.
The atmosphere continued to tingle and pop as the charged ions in the air fought and struggled to rearrange themselves back to an orderly, stable universe. The rain continued to pour down in sheet after wind-blown sheet.
Chuck’s backyard was in total disarray, and all that remained of the magnificent apple tree was a circle of smoldering black ash covering the ground. And in the center of the burn zone was a charred, jagged stump of what had been the massive apple tree trunk. The entire thing, branches, leaves, and ripening apples had been reduced to an insignificant dusting of incinerated remains. I remember that the air smelled strangely like my mother’s apple pie the day she burned it in the oven.
The rain poured down, but we ran out into it to see what was left of our game.
It was gone. Not a trace was left. Everything was incinerated, pulverized. Not one house or hotel was left. Not one Chance card or Community Chest card. Not one deed, not one token or scrap of money.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started as we stood in the middle of the burned out area. Chuck and Meiszko’s disagreement was past and forgotten. It looked like we were all friends again.
Staring at the charred remains on the ground, Chuck said in a low, shaky voice that cracked with emotion, “That could have been us.”
“That’s the end of our game.” I said. Meiszko and Chuck nodded in agreement.
“It’s over.” Duke reiterated. But he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out a substantial wad of Monopoly money. Holding it aloft triumphantly in his grimy fist, he cackled, “And I’m the winner! I’m the only one with money left!”
That was the end of our Monopoly games and the heat wave too. The next morning I awoke to a cool stiff breeze blowing in my bedroom window. That day for supper my mother made a pot roast that sat on the stove all afternoon, and a peach pie that baked in the oven at the same time. My father couldn’t be happier.
