Next door, in a run-down daiquiri-pink house with bedsheets instead of curtains on the windows, lived Whitey Carr, who loved to pound me every Sunday with his tiny fists. My mother said I had to feel sorry for Whitey because he’d lost his mom, and his brother, Raja, had come back crazy from the war. Whitey was thirteen, a year older than I was, and my mother said his younger sister, Queenie, was already a tart. A tart sounded good to me. They sold them from outdoor stands in Balboa Park at the Old Globe Theatre, where my mother and father took me to see Shakespeare plays. Lemon tarts were the best.