The Third Rail

Do you really think that an eight or nine year old boy kid on the streets of Brooklyn could really rack up memories of the caliber of stuff I’m rambling on about? Bet on it. All it takes is the proper recipe--you know, like baking a cake. The recipe in this case was one part fate, three parts luck, four parts circumstance and a whole lot of opportunity. Never mind the math. Stir that into the back roads of your mind and there you have the fixings for some tasty indelible, experience soup. Hey, no one says you gotta’ believe any of it, but, either I’m one hell of story teller or it all happened like I say it did. Not unlike a bank, I can only take out what went in--how’s that for a bit of philosophy? So, where are we? Let's just move through the sticky parts and dash through the boring ones. Seems ironic that I use the word boring here, since I don’t think I can remember one instance in my daring-do life-- except maybe when mom made me go to Church-- that was boring. A short walk to it from the apartment was all that was required to rack up some hairy episodes. Here’s one of them.

I was supposed to wait for mom down stairs on the stoop, one sunny Sunday morning to go to the church up off Liberty Ave. but I got antsy when she didn’t show up in thirty seconds and instead started ambling up toward Atlantic Avenue, hands in my trouser pockets, kicking invisible thingys into the air with my right foot. I was headed to where, once upon a time, the Long Island Railroad was on top of Atlantic Ave. until they buried it deep under the same ground. It’s called the subway, (that's where the name you recognize as a sandwich place, originated.) Now if you think of it in terms of "wonder what the kid had in mind" to it’s "a wonder he lived to be eight or nine," you’ll start to grow me inside your head. The tracks were laid out like any other ones you've undoubtedly seen--two tracks in one direction and two in the other. They were all spiked down tightly to big fat wooden tarred railroad ties embedded in thick two inch semi-round dull gray gravel laying on top of plain old dirty dirt. Now, one might think that the authorities would put some kind of fence around them to keep kid people like me from walking the rails, as it were. Yeah, there were crossing gates but they were way up the block. Now, you may have had a time or two in your life that you walked the rails. However, I'd almost bet that was after electric trains took over from electric rails, right? Let me ask you a question?

Are you old enough to remember the other rail, aptly named the third rail? The one covered with wood held about six inches above it with metal brackets somehow tied to the Earth? Do you know what the third rail was there for? Yup, you got it. It was the source of the electric power that ran the trains. There were signs all over the joint expounding the dangers of death and disaster. Big deal. Not a great safety measure, in my opinion.

But, so what? Who cares? After all, it was covered, right? Yes it was, but let me explain the theory of electricity to you. Think about it. At least a skillion volts coursed through that iron rail, hovering just above your ankles. No problem. Now, theoretically, you could actually walk on the bare steel rail itself if, first, you hopped clear off the ground onto it, ("ground" is the key word here!) and simply hopped off it back on to the ground on the other side again, right? No problem. The trick was not to have one foot on the ground and one on the rail at the same time, because--guess what--you’d get to do that only once--and never, ever again-- problem. But, of course, there was an eight inch by two inch thick wooden guard over it to prevent an idiot like me from doing that, right? Still with me? Now the fun part begins--at least in my kid brain at the moment of truth, that is.

　You see, I was invincible. I could impress just about anyone, including the track walkers employed by the LIRR to keep daredevils like me from committing suicide. Cops kept an eye out for us lunatics, too. Of course, if necessary, I could out run any one of them. (PS They were cops of yesterday, not the ones like you see on CSI and Law and Order of TV fame--each one a slim, trim athlete.) But , there was always that tight, small group of gasping pedestrians, to impress with my wonderful sense of balance--cops or no cops. Let's move on.

I would stand about two inches away from the third rail, feet and knees held tightly together, hands running stiffly down my sides so I wouldn’t be tempted to do a stupid thing like the" one foot on the ground and one on the rail" thing, HOP up onto the wooden guard and immediately off to the other side to the ground, like a chicken, without as much as a sunburn to show for the daring feat. No problem. I would then complete my act in a gesture of grand finale by jumping back up onto the wooden guard, teetering to keep my impeccable balance, do a half pirouette to the right, (I was right footed,) and gingerly ran the narrow wood, arms outstretched like a whooping crane, Ala the Karate Kid of movie fame, on a takeoff run for a swaying side to side ten feet or so, like one might do on a tight rope --PS the Wallendas were my hero’s--think? Oh , you don’t know who they were? Guess. -- hop off the side of my choice--usually the one with the largest audience , as they stared, transfixed in horror at this nut cake running the third rail---always the consummate actor--or when I had the most attention of screaming mime’s yelling at me to get off the damned thing or people murmuring to themselves, "oh, my God, he’ll be killed!" I could hear those chicken adults whispering to each other--"he must be insane!" In a gesture of grand departure, I'd hop to the ground and run off down the railroad ties, stage right. Can you imagine all the fun I had making the going-to- church types quake in their boots, so to speak? As you might have guessed--and seeing as how I’m telling you this story--I never missed. Then, I was off at a run up Linwood Ave. to the church where another panicked group was yelling questions at me all at the same time, most wondering where the heck I had been. The leader of the pack?--mom. What would you have done?