Some weekends my father would take me for a ride, always on the spur of the moment. “Okay, buddy.” He’d clap his hands with excitement. “Let’s go—just me and you.”
Part of the fun was that I never knew where we were going. I’d hop in the car, and we’d drive around Brooklyn, each time visiting different places—Coney Island, Prospect Park, Sheepshead Bay. Once we took the ferry from Brooklyn to Staten Island. From there, we caught another ferry to lower Manhattan, where we ate in Chinatown and he read my fortunes. That was the most fun. I cracked open a few cookies with my fist and handed the small slips of paper to my father. He read the inscriptions on each of them in a deep, mysterious voice. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” “All good things come to those who wait.”
I handed him the last fortune, and his face darkened. “Oh boy,” he said, “this one doesn’t look too good.”
“What’s it say?”
“You sure you wanna know?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
My father put his arm around me. “It say you very ticklish!” He tossed the fortune over his shoulder and wiggled his fingers, tickling my stomach and underarms. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Later that afternoon we drove over the Manhattan Bridge on our way home; the hum of the tires against the cement filled my ears. We rode around Brooklyn for about ten minutes and wound up on a bleak cobblestone street not far from the cluster of dreary warehouses that surrounded the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My father drove slowly, glancing at the row of brown-brick tenements that lined the block. He stopped in front of a run-down, three-story apartment house.
“Son of a bitch. I can’t believe it’s still here.”