Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty Page A

was not someone he could talk to, even if he knew what to say. Though Lee had assumed a mantle of responsibility, he was still a boy. One day, flirting with a group of girls, he abandoned Joey near Steeplechase (“the Funny Place”). A policeman found the child wandering alone and took him to the station, where Sylvia picked him up.
    In Now and Then, Heller observed that around this time, he began to bite his nails, a nervous habit, which he implied was associated with the effect his father’s absence, or his silence about it, had on him.
    During summers, Lena, busy with her sewing, lost track of Joey as he ran to play on the beach with neighborhood friends: his old pal Marvin Winkler, whom everyone called “Beansy,” for reasons no one could later remember; a boy named Murray Rabinowitz, known as “Rup”; Tony Provenzano, son of the Hellers’ landlord; Lou Berkman; and Danny Rosoff, called the “Count,” perhaps because of his fondness for swashbuckling tales in adventure books. The kids would fly past Moses’ Candy Store (Mr. Moses, always scowling and hitching up his trousers), skitter by a Catholic orphanage located between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk, and stare at the pale, freckled boys behind the gate. Joey and his gang spent afternoons playing punchball or throwing confetti in the faces of girls, hearing them scream in delight and irritation (the boys especially liked to torment two neighborhood gals known to some of the older guys as “Squeezy” and “Frenchy”), or pooling the nickels their parents gave them for chocolates, jelly doughnuts, potato chips, or pretzels. Then they’d sprint, shouting and laughing, toward crowds sunbathing on the sand or lining up like obedient soldiers, wearing backpacks and carrying provisions, waiting to ride the Wonder Wheel, Shoot-the-Chutes, the Mile Sky Chaser, the Tornado, the Thunderbolt, or the brand-new Cyclone. Ride by ride, Joey built his courage for the next teeth-rattling challenge. He once said, “I approached [the Chaser] … in the same frame of mind with which I suppose I will eventually face death itself—with the conviction that if other people could go through it … I could too.” (The Mile Sky Chaser featured a sudden eighty-foot drop.)
    The boys discovered that elderly visitors to Luna Park or Steeplechase, becoming fatigued, did not use all their ride tickets. Joey and his friends would sneak inside the parks and ask the oldsters if they could take the unused tickets. Joey gathered enough passes to go many times on any ride he wanted—to the point that soon he was so blasé, he never wanted to ride anything again. Thrills! Spills! Excitement! Nothing lived up to its billing for long. “[Eventually,] I could anticipate accurately every dive and turn of the Mile Sky Chaser with my eyes closed better than, years later, I was ever able to read an aerial map in the air corps,” he wrote in his memoir.
    Walking home each dusk, passing fashionably dressed couples being pushed along the boardwalk in rolling wicker chairs, Joey loved the raucous patter of Yiddish rising from porch stoops as women, fresh from doing the day’s laundry or washing dishes, sought company and cool air. His mother was not so enamored of the neighborhood. The crowds were growing bigger on the boardwalk—louder, more vulgar, she thought. This was no place for a kid. Coney was a “ chozzer mart,” she hissed: a pig market.
    Since the completion of the subway line from Manhattan, the number of daily visitors to Coney Island at summer’s peak had almost doubled from half a million just a few years before. There was more noise and trash. Known as “the Nickel Empire” now, because of the five-cent train fares and the cheaper entertainments on display to draw bigger and bigger throngs, the place was pure frenzy. Sometimes there wasn’t enough space on the beach for a