was still under the window. As he slowly opened the first box, I saw that it was completely filled. I saw candles, some old hardware, matches for lighting fires, empty old perfume bottles, and even a couple old photographs. The other box had more candles and some old books that looked like they were from before the Civil War. Johnny looked at the photographs for a minute and then handed them to me. They seemed to be of somebody’s grandparents standing on the beach with a big Atlantic City, New Jersey sign behind them.
“Look at those ridiculous bathing suits, nobody would wear anything like that now,” Johnny said.
“They look pretty funny, don’t they?”
“They do seem to be having a fun day at the beach though,” I added.
“Well at least these candles will come in handy,” Johnny said.
Johnny moved the table back near the corner of the room where it had been and neatly arranged the four wooden chairs around it. He struck the match and held it to the candlewick and it quickly lit. He reached down on the ground grabbing two rocks from the floor and wedged them around the candle to hold it up straight. The light from the candle gave the room a warm glow and made it seem like a much more peaceful place. It cast shadows on the outside walls of the room and gave it a bit of a spooky feeling. With the big comfortable couch, sitting in the middle of the room it seemed a lot like home.
6
As Monday morning rolled around, we started our weekly routine of going to school early each morning and coming home to do our chores around the house at night. Johnny always had more chores than I did, as my mom pushed me to spend more of my time on my school studies. Even when his chores were finished, Johnny could always find a good excuse for avoiding his homework. He ended up in my bedroom nearly every evening, and I finished his schoolwork for the next day. Each night after supper Johnny and I would sneak off to our hideout, careful never to tell anyone where we were going. As we arrived at the secret entrance, we would wait until nobody was watching and squeezed through the window. It was much easier now that the window frame was gone.
Each day we brought small items from home, and set them up in the basement.
“Let’s go in your cellar and scrounge up some stuff to take to the clubhouse,” Johnny said. “I bet you got all kinds of great stuff just lying around.”
“Why don’t we go in your house and see what we can find,” I replied.
“You know we don’t have anything worthwhile lying around our house, and besides you’re the one with all the money,” he said in a sarcastic tone.
Johnny knew better than that, we both knew neither of our families had very much in the way of money.
“Yea right, let’s go through both our cellars and see what kinds of junk we’ll find,” I answered.
We started in my house. We snuck down the cellar and Johnny started grabbing things.
“These pillows will come in handy, and what about these candles and matches,” Johnny said. “Hey this old foot stool will be perfect for resting my tired feet on.”
“Hey, I don’t know if I am allowed to take this stuff,” I said as I tried to stop Johnny from picking things up.
“Don’t worry, when people put stuff down the cellar it’s because it’s junk they don’t want in their house no more,” Johnny said with a smug look on his face. “You got so much good junk just sitting here we won’t need to go through my cellar at all.”
We ended up making two trips to the clubhouse with crates full of things from my cellar and we never did get around to looking in Johnny’s house.
Johnny did scrounge up an old painting with flowers that I think he stole from the junkyard and we hung it on a nail sticking out of the wall. By bringing some of our own things, it made it feel much more like it was our place, a home away from home.
Once inside our hideout we would lie on the couch and leave the cares of the world outside. We started to talk to each other much more than we ever had before. Johnny started to open up about his dreams of what he wanted to do when he grew up.
“When I grow up I want to be a doctor,” Johnny said. “A children’s doctor, so that I could help kids feel better. Kids need the most help and I want to be the one to help them.”
“I bet you would make a lot of money being a doctor,” I said.
“Yea, probably, but that’s not why I want to do it. I don’t really care about the money.”
“But if you made a lot of money you could buy a big fancy house,” I replied.
“Yea and then I would move out of Kensington,” he answered with his voice trailing off at the end of the sentence.
I was surprised to hear him talk about leaving Kensington behind, because I never had a thought about leaving and expected that we would both live our entire lives right here.
“I’m gonna move to New York City and live in a nice apartment with all those fancy new electrical machines they have,” Johnny said.
“Even if I do become a famous doctor and move to New York City I will still be an Athletics fan, and I’ll never root for the Yankees,” Johnny said with a sharp tone to his voice.
“You’ll probably have enough money to go to all the games and you’ll get to see Ruth play all the time,” I said with more than a hint of envy in my voice. Johnny grinned as he let the thought roll around his head.
Johnny seemed to have his whole life all planned. Why didn’t I have a plan? How could I be thirteen years old and not know what I was going to do with my life? Since Johnny had such a great plan, I figured that there was pressure on me to come up with a plan of my own. As I listened to Johnny, I promised myself that I would spend some time thinking about my future, and what I wanted to do with it.
Coming to the hideout became a daily ritual; school, chores, studies, supper, and rushing off to our secret place. Each day I realized that the time in the clubhouse was the only part of the daily routine that I actually looked forward to. By the end of the week, we had brought a deck of playing cards, a set of checkers, and both of our bags of marbles. We had enough to do there to keep ourselves entertained for hours.
Playing bottle caps was our favorite game and Johnny and I took special pride in the fact that we had invented it. We outlined a bottle cap court in the dirt on the clubhouse floor to play the game. We drew a large square with chalk and put numbers, from one to eight in boxes around the outside of the court. In the middle was a big box marked “dead”. You then started with your bottle cap in the number one square, and you flicked it with our finger trying to shoot it into the number two square. We shot by putting our middle finger inside our thumb and release it with a flicking motion, shooting the bottle caps across the court.
If you got it in the number two square, you got another turn. If not it was the other players turn. When your bottle cap landed on the “dead” spot in the middle, you had to go back to one and start over again, even if you were up to number eight. The first person to shoot their bottle caps from one to eight and back to one was the winner.
Our bottle cap collections were certainly among our most prized possessions. I had a bunch of Hires root beer caps, as well as some Coca-cola. I had caps from many beer bottles that I gotten before the Prohibition started. Johnny’s collection was every bit as good as mine was. Before prohibition, his dad bought many different beers and he had many more exotic caps than I did.
One evening in the hideout, Johnny came up with the greatest invention of all time.
“Damn! Every time I tried to knock your bottle cap out, I flick it so hard that it flips over and rolls,” I said to Johnny.
“I got an idea, hand me that,” Johnny said as he motioned for the candle that was burning on the table. “Here watch this,” and with that he started dripping the wax that was melting from the candle into the Hires Root Beer bottle cap. He held the candle sideways and let the wax drip into his bottle cap, one drop at a time. He held it there for a few minutes until the bottle cap had filled to the brim with melted wax. We did the same thing with another dozen caps.
; “Don’t touch them yet,” Johnny said as I began to put my finger into the waxy goop. “You gotta let ‘em dry or you’ll ruin them.”
We waited a few minutes until Johnny was sure they were dry, he was the one who touched them with his finger and made sure they were ready.
“Now they got some weight to them and I don’t think they’re gonna be flippin’ over no more,” John said brimming with obvious satisfaction over his patent worthy innovation.
“We’ll see,” I said with a hint of skepticism in my tone.
I had to give him credit though; this simple improvement in bottle cap technology revolutionized the game for us from that day forward.
It was obvious from the very first flick that this advancement would change bottle caps forever. The weight of the wax made the bottle cap travel in a smoother and more predictable manner. The caps stopped flipping over as they had so often before. We no longer had to worry about flicking too hard and having the cap roll on its side and go way off course. Johnny was truly a genius, a renaissance man full of great ideas; after all he had single handedly solved the problems of bottle caps game with one simple innovation.
Friday night was always the best night of the week. School was over, and I did not have to worry about my studies again until Sunday night. In school, Johnny and I had talked about the possibility of letting some of the other kids in the neighborhood into on our