A regular reader of Work of Art, who turns out to have been an across-the-street neighbor in my childhood, asked me yesterday whether all I have written about yesteryear in Las Vegas really happened.
     Rather than wait for a reply, he added that it’s extremely convee-eenient that, for example, a friend of mine would have saved us from a beating with a roll of quarters. He also mentioned a column in which we peace-loving teens were about to be attacked by two gangs and were saved by the sirens of the local constabulary.

     In short, my former neighbor, Anthony, implied the events either didn’t happen, or were a lot more innocuous than I’ve presented them.
     My answer is that every incident happened, and I described them the way I remembered them. In fact, I told Anthony that all of us likely have had similar experiences, and the difference is that I documented them. So when I reminded Anthony of the time he and I cracked a wall by rolling one of us downhill while inside a huge tire, he recalled that and even wondered how we got away without being arrested.
     Family get-togethers inevitably lead to a reminiscing. Somewhere locked securely in my cranial storage area was an incident which I’d forgotten, but became clear once my memory was jogged.
     This time we were recalling ways of making money. I stress that as products of the post-Depression, we counted every penny. Once, on the way home from church, I found a coin purse with a dime and seven pennies. I was set for a week! I felt so affluent that if I’d died of the surprise, my obituary would have read, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”
     Other members of my family found means of collecting money. Outside our house, on Railroad Avenue, was a hydrant with the valve handle coming out of the ground. We discovered once, when leaning against the exposed chicken wire on the front wall that touching the hydrant handle and the chicken wire created quite a jolt.
     My oldest sister, Dolores, already had built up a Trump-like empire by renting us her bicycle, and soaking colored crepe paper in water and selling the liquid as a fine wine. She turned the electrical hazard into capital. Rather than telling neighbor kids about the danger, she offered to provide a “thrill” for only a dime, or a charge for a slight charge.
     Some neighbors, whose father owned a grocery store, always had loose change and quickly took advantage of the “thrill.” I have been told, although I have no memory of this, that Dolores would use me as the test pilot. I got to test the “thrill” machine. Once Dolores was convinced it was working–my hair stood on edge but it didn’t kill me–she gave the neighbors their turn.
     Dolores would utter a chant, in which she extolled the virtues of receiving such a “thrill.” The device kept her in spending money. It soon became family competition, with kids placing bets on who could hold on the longest.
     It was around that time that we learned how much a $20 bill could buy. One of the members of a large family found such a bill under his father’s mattress. Years later, the neighbor said his father regularly saved money there, and the twenty he found was only one of dozens. That explanation mitigated the theft.
     The philosophy of our tight-knit Railroad Avenue crew dictated that all found riches be shared by all. That maxim applied especially when a member of a well-to-do family found a twenty.
     Several of us escorted the young Horatio Alger of the Gallinas to the Creamery, an ice cream shop on Grand, where a dollar could buy a gallon. Accompanied by a growing entourage, he walked out with several round containers of ice cream, while the rest of us selected watermelons, pop, chips and candy at the Santa Clara Grocery, two doors down.
     Perhaps 40 of us enjoyed the biggest feast of our young lives as we celebrated at a park where the Department of Labor now stands. A number of us, knowing no restraint, inhaled huge quantities of the treats. Some slathered their faces with the cold confection. And even though the food orgy resulted in a lot of heaving later that day, most of the participants remember the day fondly. They reason that it’s better to get sick because of overeating than not to have the means by which to accomplish it.
     During a recent visit, Dolores made it clear that the reason people remember the ice cream-candy-pop bash is because it was so rare. She said that the eight of us Trujillos generally ate quite frugally, and only occasionally shared a Sunday chicken, the parts being pre-assigned, in order of seniority.
     Apparently most of the community in the 1940s made do with smaller portions of food and only rarely got to binge on chips and candy bars. That era was decades before the era of the Big Gulp or the Tallsup with extra fries.
     So, in the event Anthony still believes these accounts of childhood are fictional, I remind him that he was the one who dashed over to our house with the news of the neighbor’s new riches. And Anthony, I well recall, was the first person at the party to holler, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”