Fun was free in my multicultural Brooklyn neighborhood. Our biggest investment was a spaldeen ball, purchased by scrounging for soda bottles and turning them into the corner candy store for the deposit.

Raymundo, Puerto Rican, tall with tousled brown hair, and I played stickball against a handball court with pitched balls and strikes inside a chalked-in box and the batter hitting “automatics,” with distance on the fly determining single, double, or home run. We thought ourselves pretty good until Jimmy, a natural athlete, showed up. Jimmy ate our pitching alive and threw sliders we couldn’t touch. As a child, Jimmy’s single mother, left him with an Irish immigrant woman while she worked, and he acquired a brogue. Since he was Black, when we met, my face scrunched up with a question.

“Where are you from?”

He responded. “I’m Black-Irish,” a term I didn’t know but I didn’t ask a second question.

Gene, a Jewish redhead and Simon a Brit from Liverpool were our other group of pals. We played stickball, street hockey, flipped baseball cards, or handball. To mollify Simon, we’d occasionally play soccer, which he insisted on calling football. Put a ball on Simon’s foot and he left the rest of us spinning.

I’m Anthony. My father and his and my mother’s parents were immigrants at a time when southern Italians flooding into the country were considered a threat to the American way of life. During WWII, my grandparents, who’d never applied for citizenship, were labeled enemy aliens. My father, who was too old for the army, and my mother demonstrated their patriotism by laboring in the defense industry. Having suffered at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, they taught me to respect everyone, regardless of race or religion.

Jimmy’s LPs introduced us to the Mothers of Invention and Bob Dylan. Simon collected Cream, The Doors, and The Who. Gene had access to weed, and we’d pass his father’s meerschaum pipe around while we blasted the music and nodded our heads to the beat.

My first sight of a woman in a bikini at Rockaway Beach nearly stopped my heart. Amidst sand that scorched our feet, rolling surf, and the bouquet of suntan lotion and baked knishes, our teenage years focused on chasing girls with the goal of nestling with them under shady, wood-treated boardwalks. Handsome Raymundo had first pick to any blanket we approached. When Jimmy talked to a girl his eyes would dart like he was uncomfortable, but the women loved his accent. Simon always was hot for a bit of crumpet, as he called it, but pursued less attractive girls. That worked for Gene and me because they grouped with more attractive friends.

The Vietnam war rocked our carefree youth. Jimmy got drafted into the marines and graduated Camp Lejeune muscled up like the Michelin man. Raymundo went next. Gene and Simon last. Jimmy and Simon asked me to hold their vinyl collection until they returned. I had a student exemption, attending CCNY, until the government switched to a lottery draft, stopping call-ups just two short of my birthday. Student protests over the war ramped up, but I was torn between wanting my friends to be home and worrying that they’d consider my participation in sit-ins as a betrayal of their sacrifice.

The guys would send me handwritten letters. Although they didn’t complain, I sensed their anguish and felt guilty for my freedom.

Three days in country, Simon was killed by a sniper. Jimmy stepped on a mine and his tearful mother had a closed-coffin funeral. Raymundo contracted herpes, leaving him depressed and distracted. He and Gene were killed in a Da Nang ambush. Each death notification slashed at my heart. The neighborhood honored them as heroes.

I married Maria and we had two boys, Anthony and David. I worked a nine to five job and retired at sixty-five.

Why did I live an uneventful life when my friends died far too young?

I still play Jimmy and Simon’s LPs on a turntable I’ve repaired more than once. I shed a tear of remembrance and reflect on the vicissitudes of life’s lottery. Although I cherish Maria and delight in our sons, and now our grandchildren, I worry that my meager accomplishments are unworthy of the additional fifty years of life I was given.