11-year-old Jokes

The year is 1976 and I am 11 years old. The place is my old neighborhood in The Bronx (pronounced “Da Bronx”) and it is during a lunchtime break from the torture known as sixth grade. My pal James and I managed to sneak in through a service door to a local high-rise apartment complex with the hope of meeting its most famous tenant, baseball great Willie Mays.

This was not an original idea, as every boy in our school tried to do the same. No one ever got to see Willie in person, but James and I seemed to get closer than most (we made it to the door of his penthouse apartment, but we were informed by a woman on the other side of that door that our intended target was not home).

As luck would have it, a fellow classmate named Philip lived in that same apartment complex. So James and I rode the elevator down to his floor with the hope of catching him at home (and perhaps snagging some goodies from his pantry – it was lunchtime, after all). Admittedly, it was not more...