Jocko's Gone

Authors Note: I wrote Jocko’s Gone as a love letter to an earlier time in my old neighborhood on Aurelia Court in Brooklyn where I grew up. Part of the motivation to write came from my Mom and her best friend, Kaye Schuman. They both enjoyed this fond memory when I first shared it with them, and I dedicate this story to both of them.

In 2024 I submitted Jocko’s Gone to Writer’s Digest and it won as

an alternate selection in the short life story category. They must have really liked it

because they sent me a sticker, well, also a really nice letter.

Jocko's Gone

We used to always go to Jocko’s after punch ball games because he had the coldest soda machine there ever was. It was one of those old red and white ones with a glass door and a round shape on top, like the hoods of cars from the fifties. We’d always buy Mountain Dew because you could tilt that can back and just flat drain the sweet stuff and the fizz wouldn’t close your throat.

After playing punch ball for hours in the New York summertime, coldness,

sweetness, and maximum intake by volume were of utmost importance to 8- and 9-year-olds.

Jocko was a wizened little old man who we thought lived above the office of the old Esso gas station. It was on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, just down the street from our punch ball court at the corner of Aurelia Court and 31 st street.

Our punch ball court. We never called it a field. In fact, no one else in any other neighborhood we played against called it anything but a court. Of course, all punch ball courts were streets that had been transformed into long narrow baseball diamonds with sewer manhole covers as home and second.

What was unique about our court was that we had a right field thanks to Aurelia Court because it bisected 31 st street. Actually, Aurelia Court was our stickball field. Don’t ask why it wasn’t a court. Besides, stickball is another story.

Anyway, we’d run the block and half from 31 st , past 32 nd and around the corner, past the dry cleaners, to Jocko’s even though we were hot, sweaty, and exhausted. Why? We were eight- and nine-year-olds, and we didn’t walk anywhere.

We didn’t walk to the bathroom, which was the big bush by Kevin’s building, right in the middle of our right field (and it had thorns!) Besides, we were all fast, and we knew the first one there would get the only Mountain Dew left in all the world and then drink it in front of the rest of us.

Frequently, Jocko would be sitting inside the doorway where the soda machine was, tilting on two legs of an old wooden chair, in the shady, cool, darkness at the foot of an old wooden staircase reading the paper under a single light bulb fixture hanging from the ceiling.

He was always casually dressed in slacks, shoes, and sometimes even a jacket and tie. Hot as it was. But he always had on this old fishing hat, I mean it was clean, but it must have been part of a previous outfit that he couldn’t break the habit of wearing.

He’d see us and grin and more often than not we wouldn’t pay for our sodas.

Eventually we came to understand that Jocko owned the gas station and had a friendly working partnership with the car wash next door to him.

The dry cleaners wrapped around the corner and halfway down Aurelia Court, the street we had just come from. They didn’t have customers, just the actual cleaning machines. There was a driveway with garage-style doors on that side which were always open. The steam and sweet smell of the cleaning agents would put the finishing touch on the afternoon’s excitement as we walked back through the cloying vapor and quietly drank our dews, tranquilized by the gentle, rhythmic, hissing, of the machines.

I was more of a loner than the other guys and would go to Jocko’s by myself from time to time. Usually I would politely refuse Jocko’s generosity, but I would hang around and make idle kid talk while I drank my soda. I ventured a few feet into the garage on occasion, but the mechanics weren’t as friendly as Jocko. Of course they were working. It was on one of my solo flights at warp speed down Aurelia court past the cleaners to Jocko’s that I saw him for the last time.

As I sped around the corner on a beeline for the soda machine…I stopped

hard…five feet from the doorway. Just inside like always, Jocko’s chair was tilted against the wall, facing the soda machine, and he was sitting in it, bleeding from a cut over his eyebrow. Two heavy-set white guys with dark hair and mustaches were squatting in front of him…sort of looking after him kind of…or so I thought.

I said, “Jocko! What happened?”

“Hmnn” was all he mumbled.

One of the guys looked at me and said, “He fell down the stairs. We’ll take care of him.” Mouth open, speechless, I turned and left…I never got another soda.

Soon after that, the gas station got a new name, a facelift, and two shiny tow

trucks with younger versions of the two guys I had seen with Jocko, driving them while playing loud music. Seemed like it was always Macho Man by the Village People or Cashmere by Led Zeppelin.

The cleaners went next. It became a body shop. Then used cars started being sold on the far side of the garage, gradually obscuring the entrance to the car wash, which went out of business. After a while, I just didn’t go by Aurelia court and Flatbush avenue anymore. I’d go the long way around behind our old punch ball court instead.

That was when we started going to Artie’s luncheonette on Nostrand avenue,

which we all called the candy store. I have no idea why. Eight-year-old reality was

different than adult reality. Mountain Dew’s became Egg Creams (chocolate syrup, soda water with a raw egg and a splash of milk).

A couple of years later, Artie and his wife Beverly sold the candy store and went to Florida. The new owners kept it as a luncheonette but called it something else. It no longer felt like our candy store after that. Next door, our favorite Pizza place, Napoli’s, sold also. It expanded and became a real nameless, faceless, pizza factory where college kids hung out and seemed to do nothing but smoke. George, who owned my favorite comic bookstore, The Stage, also sold out, and suddenly my whole neighborhood had changed.

Like Jocko, it was all gone. I graduated from high school, and I left too. It was as if in New York, the old saying, you can never go back, had been rewritten as the street’s version of the eleventh commandment. It wasn’t just a matter of being unable to go back. You couldn’t even stay.