A truck used to come into our NYC spanish harlem neighborhood to sell watermelons on the weekends when I was a 10 year old kid. This is my recollection of an incident that happened during one of the watermelon man's weekend visits there...

Skinny Nicky, Dopey Joe, Orlando and I were all sitting outside on my apartment building's entry steps shooting the breeze, when the potbellied, elderly watermelon man and his wife parked their watermelon filled truck neaby to us all. It had been a brutally hot day, and those watermelons really looked juicy to us all as we sat there watching him selling his melons. In his Italian broken english, he'd often say to his customers, "Ahhh senora, dese watermelons are sooo sweeta dat you gonna eata the whole ting ina one day...thata I promise you."  We were all pre-teen kids without money on us that particular day, but Dopey Joe, daredevil that he was, had decided that he wanted some watermelon anyway.  Sneaking up behind the truck while the trucker was dealing with a customer, he pulled out a watermelon much to our surprise there, and began walking away, grinning at us all. Unfortunately, he was seen by the trucker's wife through the rear view mirror, and she alerted the watermelon about it.  Suddenly, we all joined Joe in running away with the melon, and we heard the trucker begin yelling out, loudly, "Heyyyy...puta dat melon down rat now you little bums"...as he began chasing after us all.  seeing that he couldn't run fast with the heavy watermelon, and the trucker also closing in on him...Dopey Joe dropped the melon in the street and kept running.  THe melon broke in half, and angrily shaking his fists there at us all, the trucker then decided to head back towards his truck.  Once he had walked away, we all ran back and picked up the busted up melon, then headed up towards our building's rooftop...and we all wolfed it down with big grins on our faces there. We never did see the watermelon man again anymore though after that day there. Although I didn't know it, my life would soon begin taking a turn for the worst after that particular summer with my friends.........