John John and his quicker-picker-upper sweater

There were a set of characters on the old upper west side that defined the neighborhood at that time. some came with their own mythology, like Big Foot, the huge, robed, staff wielding nature man who sold drugs in sheep's meadow. it was fabled that he was one of the last native americans who came from the area originally, when it was called manahatta. Or Mel, the Rastafarian who knew everybody by name and if you stopped to talk to him he raised his fists to the sky and prayed to Jah for your safety. there was Harley, the totally tattooed guitarist for the hardcore band the Cro-Mags. he was 5'1" in height and like 4 feet wide in pure muscle, i saw him smash his guitar on a three wheeled cop vehicle in the park, with a cop in it. and then he just walked away. Then there was Cuba, a guy who played kadeema every day, all day. and had such a chiseled physique that you could never guess his age since his face looked like it was over 60. he was so respected and feared that once i saw a fight between two graffiti crews, that totalled like 40 guys in a brawl. the brawl happened in the area of the meadow where Cuba was always playing kadeema, and i shit you not, he kept on playing while the fighters made sure they didn't get in the way of his ball. i knew it was because these guys were more afraid of him alone, then they were of the 20 or so guys they were fighting with.

Then there was John John. he was a skinny puerto rican guy, maybe 5-6 years older then me and my friends. I am guessing that if he's still alive, he would look something like this. I had known him since the playground days and he was always showing up places at the weirdest times. he spoke in a thick new york city 80's slang and his voice was very nasal and slurry, kind of like Q-Tip from a Tribe Called Quest. My favorite memory of him, and one that i think fully describes his awesome way of making an appearance, was when he sopped up a large puddle with his sweater.

5 or so of my friends and I were hanging out on a stoop (very common past time when we were young and had no apartment without parents to go to). it was a stoop that was under scaffolding because the building was being renovated, a common thing back then as the neighborhood was getting slowly gentrified out of its rather dicey past. i remember we chose it because it was raining like crazy, and the scaffolding provided cover. it was the kind of summer rain in new york where it comes down in sheets and only those people smart enough to arm themselves with an umbrella dare to go even one block. there was a huge puddle formed at the bottom of the steps a few feet past us. one that looked very dirty and very unpleasant to step in. possibly even bottomless.

anyways, we were smoking a blunt. another common activity back then. with 5 kids, each could throw in a buck and with a quick trip to a bodega a few blocks uptown, we would have a nickle bag and 50 cents left over for a blunt. it was cheaper then getting a beer and there were less questions. so there we were, creating a little pungent cloud, on a dark side street, in the pouring rain. having a blast. because back then, it was just THAT easy.

suddenly we heard loud squeaking approaching fast. We were always on alert, because we had "beef" with other crews in the neighborhood, relating mostly to graffiti. and we were also on the lookout for cops, because at any given point, we had spray paint, weed, markers, 40 ounces, plus some of us had stupid things, like brass knuckles or knives (usually just to have them, and not for regular use), so to get searched by cops would mean losing all these great objects. cops, back then, never bothered taking guys like us in because there were definitely bigger fish to fry. like killers and rapists. now, i'll bet they take kids in for the slightest infraction. i can't say what system is better. for kids, the older system was harsher in some respects, but easier when it came to the law. i had cops who instead of slapping vandalism charges on me, had more fun telling me to walk away slowly. and then they started throwing the full cans of spray paint at me that they had confiscated. one of the cans hit me in the back really hard, the other cans skipped past me and exploded all over parked cars. i wondered if they ever saw the irony in that?

so the squeaking noise turned out to be a mister John John on a bmx bike that CLEARLY wasn't his since it looked like it had been for a four year old. he looked like a bear on a tricycle, due to the tiny size of the bike, but also because he had the thickest wool skiing sweater from the 70's i had ever seen. it was a sweater that i had seen him in before during the winter, but wondered why he had chosen it for this particularly wet and somewhat warm summer night. maybe he thought the sweater would just absorb the wetness well enough that he would remain dry. well, that bad choice was about to become painfully obvious to him. because what happened next, will forever be, to me, the funniest fall off a bike i had ever seen. i've taken some ludicrously bad falls in my time, which i will no doubt talk about at some point, but i can't say that any of them were as well executed as John John's. he was going down hill and had managed to gain a great amount of speed considering the tininess of his tires. one of us recognized him pretty fast, before he actually got to our stoop in fact, so by yelling his name, he had a brief chance to look our way and recognize us. we usually shared whatever we had with him, because he was good about reciprocating, despite being a complete derelict most of the time.

so, as i remember it, his head turns to see us, and he must have also noted the smell and the cloud as he rolled through it at 20 miles per hour. what he tried to do next was completely unnecessary, as he could have come to stop slowly, passing us, and then turned around to come back. but instead, he must have just given his front break the death grip, something that even the most inexperienced rider learns to never do. that particular summer he had something of a blow out afro which i remember being already a bit wet, and pushed back by the wind of his speed. so what he did next will forever be an image in my mind. his bike locked up right at the precise moment it started passing in front of our stoop so we all got the most incredible view of his trajectory. as the bike flipped over he let go and basically leveled out. he, in essence, pulled a John John version of superman in mid take off. again, time seems to have slowed down for us like it does at the best moments. his mouth opens and a slow, very well articulated (especially for John John) "oh shiiiiiiiit" is clearly audible. the bike does a flip under him and bounces sideways and veers sharply into a parked car, very quickly abandoning it's air born driver as if it's still annoyed that he had stolen it from it's previous owner. John John and his half moon afro, with his arms oscillating like a bird learning to fly, looked right at me in the middle of his flight and then i am pretty sure he looked at the blunt. i'll never forget that look, like he was disappointed that his flight was clearly going to take him past the blunt's location. so despite his effort, he was still going to have to wait to take a toke.

at that point it's all about the landing. the air born part is just a peaceful interlude of self reflection. the landing is indeed the actual catastrophy. his landing was the best part, really. it would have been a bloody one had it been a dry day. but as luck would have it. his perfect arc and his high velocity allowed him to clear the whole stoop, he even cleared the banister which he would have probably clipped had he been going slower. instead, he was a direct hit, with that bottomless puddle i mentioned. so direct that i can't say if he even hit concrete at all. there was a black, muddy explosion, and then stillness. he was face down in the puddle. i think he might have thought he was dead, because he didn't immediately jump up. he kind of did a slow motion push up. the best part about that, was we all got to see how his thick sweater had sopped up the WHOLE puddle. he must have weighed 20 extra pounds at that point. I've never seen a puddle or spill get soaked up like that. he was a living example of one of those old bounty commercials where that diner waitress soaks up the coffee by just patting the spill with a sheet of bounty. the quicker picker upper. that was John John in a nut shell. we laughed for a long long time about that one. i hope he's alive and well.