Hey, where'd I grow up?
I was born in a Jewish charity hospital (no that is not an oxymoron) in Brooklyn, NY, USA, in 1942. My parents were the children of immigrants and they had nothing when they married. We lived a tiny apartment in a brick building on a street of people who hated us.
See, my parents had both grown up in Jewish neighborhoods, like this isolated voluntary ghetto. But then my dad's got his eyes on the prize and decides being ethnic is holding him back. So he changes his last name, shortens it from Rabinowitz to Reed and like so many other upwardly mobile young guys, takes off for less Semitic pastures.
He and my mom get hitched and he knocks her up with me. Now he's really gotta find a better place to live. Women didn't work as much back then so my dad has all this pressure on him to make a good life for us. He's working from eight a.m to like twelve o'clock at night and always unpleasant and tempermental.
The house is in, as I said before, Brooklyn. And it's not like we were the only people like us on the block but the old neighbors, well, I guess they thought we were invading their space or something. So I got to be good with my fists despite not being such a big guy.
I remember sort of hazily, the drug store where I bought my Superman comics and egg creams. I could barely see over the counter and when I sat on a stool at the diner, my feet seemed miles above the floor. I used to play stickball in the street- that's like baseball but for kids who have nothing to play baseball with. We had a first floor apartment, my mother had a Victory Garden-that's something the government thought up cause food was rationed because of the War, so they said "hey, here's an idea for all you patriotic, veggie loving americans! Why not try growing it yourselves?" Mothers put up stars in their windows if they had a son off in the army- there was some color code to it for if you had a kid who died or was wounded.
We moved to Long Island when I was eleven. My dad's career was really taking off, we got this big house with a real lawn and a Mercedes in the driveway. That was about the same time as rock'n'roll happened to me for real. We lived in the same neighborhood as a bunch of other rich Jewish suburbanites. Our next door neighbors had this son named Eddie who liked to shoot a pellet gun at passing cars. Alan Hyman was sort of my best friend but I think we're just getting to be too different. He's all "I want to be a respectable lawyer" and I'm all "fuck that, I wanna smoke dope and play the blues."