He was a beanpole. Six foot two, a hundred forty pounds. Johnny had light-blue eyes, a thin face and crooked front teeth. When he smiled, his upper gums showed. Johnny had a crescent-shaped scar on the bridge of his straight thin nose; it was a visible reminder of a time in Taft’s dustbowl when he’d gotten too close to Tommy D when Tommy was swinging a baseball bat, and the bat clipped him.

Johnny was two years older than me, four years older than my best friend Josh. He was a rare Protestant in a Jewish neighborhood. His parents were divorced, which was unusual in our neighborhood in the early fifties. He lived on the top floor of the apartment building next to mine with his father, his brother Miltie, and his grandmother, Mrs. F, a short, frail woman in her mid-eighties. She was blind in one eye, and one of her eyeglass lenses was frosted and bound with clear tape to hold it in place.