Growing Up In Brooklyn

A childhood friend of mine took the Bar Exam yesterday, and I happened to run into him on the corner last night. He said he burst out laughing in the middle of the exam, which as he described it as being the most important moment of his life so far. He said he had read a question involving a couple getting caught pulling off a charity scam when he had a memory that he hadn’t thought of for 10 years pop into his head. He asked if I knew what it could have been? My response was, you must have thought about when we were about 6 or 7 and would pretend to be blind and in need of money. I was dead on right. I can’t remember the last time I thought of those blind charity scams we did.

This is how we came up with the idea. See, we lived a few blocks away from the Century 21 department store, on busy 86th Street in Brooklyn, and in the mid 1980s there were all kinds of beggars, and pretzel vendors out of a supermarket wagon type of folk. One beggar in particular was a blind guy, who was either a dwarf or had his legs completely removed or really tiny baby legs, and he had his big can for donations, and sit in his wheelchair screaming, “Please won’t someone help find my mommy!” And he screamed it in a slightly higher than normal pitch yet all nasally about it at the same time. He pronounced it with lots of ups and downs in his vocal range too. The site of this guy in my head, with his voice still puts a grin on my face as I write this now. For some reason I always thought he couldn’t find his mommy simply because he was blind, and that he obviously needed money since he had no mommy - or that he needed money to at least cure his blindness.

We were 6 or 7 and we were genius about it. We would set up shop in front of my friends’ house; we had a table and two chairs. Then the one of us (usually me) would pretend to be completely blind. I would do this by closing my eyes as tight as I could when someone was walking up the block, close to the house, and stating to everyone that passed, I’m blind and cannot see a think. My friend would run after the people with his hand out begging for a donation to help me see. As if money alone would help us see, or that a blind person couldn’t have been able to do anything in society other than beg for money. I have since realized otherwise, but as a little kid I didn’t see everything in full view, I only saw part of things, and would piece together small pieces into something that wasn’t fully accurate. Once a woman walked past up and didn’t give us a donation, and then a few minutes later came back to yell at us, and that being blind is no joke. Being blind is no joke, but how two young children get the idea to form a charity scam involving the pretense of them being blind, hysterical.