Julio was my next-door neighbor, and we were in the same fifth-grade class in school.
I watched them flirt with Julio, my back against the brick wall. My mother didn’t let me wear skirts, especially the short kind the other girls wore with their hairless legs and fearless way of flicking their hips. In Corona, girls learned early to flash skin, flirt, chew gum, and play games to bring the boys down to their knees, even though it usually ended up the other way around.īut I was not one of them. He carried his body like fire, matchstick, rope.Īll the girls in school showed off for Julio, cursing and fighting. Julio had beauty marks all over, as if it wasn’t obvious to everyone how he looked.
We didn’t hang out anywhere at all, but I loved him the way you only could when you were a child. We didn’t hang out down by the schoolyard like Paul Simon must have with his Julio. Then I saw these pictures of him standing in front of one of those tan brick homes. Well, at first, I couldn’t believe it was Corona he was singing about, because why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona? I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen, and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those. Seein’ me and Julio down by the schoolyard…” That’s Corona.Īnd you know the song by Paul Simon? The one where he says, “ Goodbye to Rosie, the queen of Corona. You know, the kind made from brick this tan color no self-respecting brick would be at all. And we didn’t know about any valley of ashes because by then it had been topped off by our houses. Scott Fitzgerald called the valley of ashes as the Great Gatsby drove past it on his night of carousal, but what me and my own know as home. I’m talking about the Lemon Ice King, Spaghetti Park, and P.S. Corona, I’m talking about a little village perched under the number 7 train in Queens between Junction Boulevard and 111th Street.
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