The following is an excerpt from the story City Boy:
If Richie Doherty had one thing that set him apart in Gideon Garatdjian’s mind, it was his ability to make the balls he hit go farther and higher than those that came off the bats of the other boys. A casual swing would send a ball to the deepest part of the outfield on the baseball diamonds of Manhattan. It was a gift only baseball gods like Musial and Mays and Snider and Mantle possessed.
Despite his prowess with a bat, Richie’s social standing wasn’t any greater than Gideon’s in the fourth grade class at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. Going through the day in their wrinkled white oxford shirts, they were not within that inner circle that regularly attended birthday parties for classmates with more well-to-do parents. If the Yorkville block of rundown tenements and wild, frightening kids on the far east side of the island where Richie lived was a shock to Gideon, that shock was no more than his own shamefully messy apartment was to the classmate who got a glimpse of it one morning and spread the word throughout the school that Gideon Garatdjian lived in a pigsty.
But life changed for Richie the summer following fourth grade. His family relocated to the far reaches of Queens, and in the fall he would be attending a school closer to home. The change was one that left Gideon feeling shaken and sad.It was a different time in the life of the city, when it was nothing for kids to travel alone on the subway, or at least relatively unsupervised kids such as Gideon. Often he would leave the apartment in the morning and not return before nightfall, and when he did he would be filthy from exploring the alleyways of the neighborhood with his friends. Even so, this was not the usual ride from the Upper West Side, where Gideon lived, to Penn Station, for Sunday school, or even the familiar route over the Manhattan Bridge on the BMT to Coney Island. Queens was unknown territory, and his unease grew as he stood in the front car watching the Flushing-bound train arrive at and depart from one unfamiliar station after another along the el. It was the kind of weak-in-the-knees fear he could experience when, at the beach, his father would swim far out toward the horizon, prompting the lifeguard to blow his whistle.
Download this story as a pdf: City Boy