Magic kept us alive in those early
years—Magic and Eric White.
Better than after school at Big Brothers on Feltzer Street. Better than music or sports or hanging with the boys downtown. Me and Adam, B-Ball and Eric. We weren’t a gang, despite what everybody says now. Never trashed anything or messed anybody up. Never even went bumming like a lot of kids, pickin' easy money out of the human furniture sprawled on the tenement stairs and up at the aqueduct. We were the Magic Boys. We had Eric and he had us and that was more family than any of us had at home.
My Eric, not like TV showed him or the papers described him years later, would always be twelve years old. Blond hair spiked and matted like a favorite cat toy. Black leather jacket with a dog chain tied across the bottom. It was the closest he could get to the tough guy leathers we saw on the corners. He wore cast off Doc Martins his big brother didn’t want anymore – three sizes too big. You'd hear his clumping long before he ever stomped into view. But for all that, he carried himself like a prince. An heir apparent to a royalty none of us doubted for a second. He was Eric White. The kid with the magic.