Charlie’s Angels 

The bridge actually had an official name. Lucy? Commissioner Lucy? It didn’t matter. We didn’t know who he was. What we saw was the dripped, spray-painted white

                           KHOMEINI SUCKS!

right there in the middle of the worn pavement, starting to now wear away itself. It was a closed bridge. Run down. Unable to withstand the weight of anything more than some kids and their bikes, it decayed with disuse. It was our tree house above the train tracks. A clubhouse. A line of demarcation separating us from the kids who lived on the other side. The neighborhood demilitarized zone. 

And we were the appointed soldiers of this 38th parallel. 

With our legs inserted through rusted sections of load-deficient railing, we swung them back and forth, above meandering freight trains whose engineers waved at us graciously from below. They were just too slow to fear. And we feared nothing then anyway. Maybe the trains were full of toxic chemicals on their way to be laden into the ground a mile or so away at Roche. Maybe they were full of banshees keening their way northward to frighten lesser children. Or bound with clay artifacts lifted from where they had been carefully placed by Lenape families. Holding our tub of iced tea mix, we licked our fingers, dipped them in, and thoughtfully absorbed the sugary, caffeine powder which, once wet, clumped sweetly on our tongues.

“Meet me by the Khomeini sucks,” we’d say – indirectly vulgar, but threatening enough to render it aloud. A starting point. An ending spot. A moment to rest in between a taxing game of hide and seek and a sultry afternoon of Charlie’s Angels at Yolanda’s house. A place to discuss who would be Kelly. Or Sabrina. It was so important to sort these details out ahead of time, before you were pointing your finger-shaped gun into the bushes, stuck being Sabrina. Again. 

“Come out with your hands up.”

Those days, hostages were grainy images of the somber blindfolded. Khomeinis were posters of bearded men, bobbing up and down in crowds of self-flagellating foreigners while we ate our Prince spaghetti dinners. Or abandoned bridges, where children were left to the devices of their imaginations, fueled by light traffic and the heavy engineering delays of small town politics. 

When the cars fly up Nutley Avenue now – even my car – over the spot where Khomeini once sucked, it is poignant. I see three girls, legs dangling without fear, staring down the headlight of an approaching locomotive. About to grow up.