Free World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow

came to the door I had dumped the slingshot in the ash can. It was powerful magic, it had some animating force of its own, well beyond the strength in my child’s arms. No wonder it was, with the spring-blade knife, the weapon of choice of the swastika youths.
    One day I was sitting with Pinky on the steps and an older boy stopped and offered me a chance on a punchboard, a cardboard packet with a grid of little holes fitted with white paper plugs.At the top was a cartoon of a girl in harem pants dancing with her arms over her head. For a nickel I might win a dime, fifty cents, or even five dollars. The nickel in my pocket was for ice cream, but I turned it over to him. Punchboards were made in Japan, a country specifically known to all children as the source of cheap toys and novelties that broke very quickly. With the punch key, a miniature version of the kind of key used to open a sardine tin, I pushed out my chance, a tightly folded accordion-pleated piece of paper a half-inch long. I unfolded it with the seller looking over my shoulder. I felt his hot breath on my ear. The chance was blank. I experienced the loss of my nickel.
    Later Donald questioned me. “Was the punchboard full?”
    “Yes, I was the first.”
    “If the punchboard is honest,” Donald said, “and you have only the kid’s word on that, then when you buy your chance affects the odds. Do you know what odds are?”
    “No.”
    “Well, look, if the board is half punched and the kid tells you the prize money is still unclaimed, then you have a better chance of winning. Do you get it? Your odds are better.”
    I strove to understand.
    “Well, you’d better forget it anyway,” Donald said. “It’s gambling. Gambling is illegal. You can get caught. Mayor La Guardia took the slot machines out of the candy stores and now he’s after the punchboards. It’s in all the papers. So you might as well forget the whole thing, if you know what’s good for you.”
    I was prepared to do that. A couple of years later I would overhear some boys in school describing an older girl as a punchboard. I was unable to make the metaphorical leap, though understanding something bad was being said.
    But the scumbag, ah the scumbag, here was an item so loathsome, so evil, that the very word itself was too terrible to pronounce. There was a seemingly endless depth of dark meaning attached to this word, with intimations of filth, and degradation, touching on such dark secrets as the young prince of life that I was would live in eternal heavenly sunlight not to know. In order to learn what a scumbag specifically and precisely was, beyondthe foul malevolence of the sound of the word, you had to acquire knowledge of sick and menacing excitements to a degree that would inflict permanent damage to your soul. Yet of course I did learn, finally, one summer at the great raucous beach of crashing waves and sand-caked bodies known as Rockaway.
    T he beach was something my mother and father could agree on. Why they favored Far Rockaway at the sea edge of Brooklyn I did not quite understand. It was an enormous journey getting there. Perhaps my memory is faulty, perhaps we never made a day trip to Far Rockaway but rented a bungalow there for a week, in the summer, in the years when my father was doing comparatively well. But I remember, after a subway ride downtown, standing in the cavernous waiting room of Penn Station. We had with us bundles and blankets, newspapers and picnic baskets. High above was the vaulted roof of steel and translucent glass. The steel ribs that buttressed the roof were curved as delicately as scrollwork. Holding everything up were slender black-steel open columns taller than the columns that supported the elevated tracks on Jerome Avenue. The sun came through the roof on planes of dust, giving everything a pale greenish color and hushing the vast babble of all the people waiting for their trains, and the redcaps with their baggage dollies, and the echoing public