When I was five, my brother and I played at a concert in Mount Kisco, New York. While a virtuoso pianist was performing his solo, I managed to pull the curtain down on him. I was supposed to get paid $20 for my own performance, but they refused to give me the money. I would’ve been willing to accept punishment for my prank, but it was unjust not to pay me for my work, so I announced to my parents that I was going to run away from home, even though we weren’t home yet.
We were still upstate, staying at a farm. My father packed some clothes and food in a bandana, tied it to the end of a broomstick, and slyly sent me on my way. My mother was frantic, but my father knew I had no place to go. After walking for almost an hour along strange dirt roads, I turned around and came back, defeated and dependent, but I still appreciated the way my bluff had been called.
I could recall getting fitted for my Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, which my mother had dutifully sewn, and being photographed in it. I could remember the day of the concert, running and sliding in the marble corridors of Carnegie Hall before the recital began. This musical Mecca held no special reverence for me. Then I was in a dressing room, tuning my violin and putting resin on my bow. Then backstage, peeking through the curtain.
Given a slight shove by Mr. Goodman, I almost tripped as I walked onstage. (A review in Musical Courier would report that I had “skipped engagingly.” It was my earliest encounter with media distortion of the facts.) Then I was standing at the center of the stage, doing owl eyes at a bald man in the front row who was staring at me. I finally closed my eyes and began playing the Vivaldi concerto. And then came that itch in my left leg . . .
Now that I was really awake, I kept trying to recapture the sensation of my original zap. I would focus on that moment at Carnegie Hall again and again, as if to verify my sense of self. I had the innocence and curiosity of a newborn baby combined with the sophistication and skills of a six-year-old. I was proud that I could tie my shoelaces in the dark. I was amazed that there was extra skin on my elbows so they could bend. And I wondered whether God had intended for boys to button their shirts one way and for girls to button their blouses another way.
I was often late for school because I would constantly get distracted by my education. A trail of ants on the sidewalk could do it. I watched them meandering back and forth, and wondered if ants had to memorize stuff, or if individual ants ever got in trouble. Even though my mother always sent me off to school early, my teacher complained about my lateness. One time my mother followed me to school. She couldn’t help but notice that I was walking all the way there by taking two steps backward for every three steps forward. How could I explain to her that I was only trying to exercise my willpower? I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
At the age of seven, I saw my first movie, Intermezzo. It was also Ingrid Bergman’s first movie. She fell in love with her violin teacher, and I fell in love with the title theme song. I couldn’t fathom why it felt so good to hear a specific combination of notes in a certain order with a particular rhythm, but it gave me such pleasure just to keep humming that sweet melody over and over to myself. It was like having a secret companion. I couldn’t wait to tell Mischa Goodman that I wanted to learn how to play “Intermezzo.” But he obviously didn’t share my enthusiasm.
“Intermezzo?” he sneered. “That’s not right for you.”
His words reverberated in my heart. That’s not right for you! This was not merely a turndown of my request. It was a universal declaration of war upon the individual.
In 1940, my family moved from one section of Queens to another, from Sunnyside to Astoria. I saw my second movie, Knute Rockne, about the Notre Dame football coach, and Ronald Reagan, who starred as the Gipper, became my first role model. I didn’t know anything about him except that he seemed so handsome and manly on the big screen.
And, once again, I fell in love with the background music. This time it was the Notre Dame school song: “Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame! Wake up the echoes cheering her name!” I kept singing it to myself, with my own lyrics: “Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame! You take the Notre, I’ll take the Dame!” My parents said I could go to Notre Dame someday if I wanted to, but I told them I just liked the song, that’s all. I didn’t even mention it to Mischa Goodman.
A young bully lived in our apartment house, and I decided to do something about it. My mother had a fancy box of chocolates, so I took one of those little pieces of dark brown paper in which the candies nested, and placed it over my two front teeth so they appeared to be missing when I smiled. Holding in my hand a pair of bloody molars our family dentist had recently extracted, I went from door to door claiming that the bully had knocked my teeth out.
“You have a perverted sense of humor,” one neighbor told me.
I assumed this was a compliment and thanked her politely. Then I looked up perverted in the dictionary. Unnatural? Abnormal? And I thought I had been providing a public service. But here I was in trouble again. My father spanked me with his leather belt, and I knew what my intention had been, but that only made him madder. It was ridiculous. The harder he hit me, the more I laughed, even while I was crying.
My father punished me in ways that might have traumatized another kid. If I ate with my fingers, he would make me eat off a plate on the floor like an animal. But I was lucky. I had been blessed with a sense of absurdity. Nevertheless, I tried to stay out of trouble at home. However, I continued to get in trouble at my new school. I got in trouble for not wearing a red necktie to the auditorium on assembly day. Then I got in trouble for wearing a red necktie because it was on a T-shirt. I also got in trouble for not bowing my head when they recited religious material.
One time there was this mean teacher whose gray hair was tinted blueish, so I drew a stick figure of her with colored chalk on the blackboard, giving her a patch of purple pubic hair. Another time, there was a student who got transferred to reform school for exposing himself, and I thought that wasn’t fair. The next day, before the teacher came in, I stood in front of the class and unbuttoned my fly, only to reveal a picture of my pippy that I had drawn the previous evening as a self-imposed art–home-work assignment. The whole class laughed at the way I was bending the rules of indecent exposure, and I got away with it.
If I were a kid who did those kinds of things today and got caught, I would undoubtedly be force-fed Ritalin through a Pez dispenser.
I embraced whatever bits of wisdom captured my fancy. My mother would say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and I would take that as a personal omen. My father would mention “the law of supply and demand,” and I would adopt that as a method of understanding all human behavior. But I was also intrigued with the way adults were always giving orders to kids that they would never give to other adults. At one family gathering, they were doing it again, but this time I was prepared.
“Paul, take that sweater off,” one of my aunts said. “It’s so hot in here.”
“I can’t. My shirt has no sleeves.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Now take it off.”
But I had already cut the sleeves off an old shirt at the shoulders, saving only the cuffs, which I left sticking out of the sleeves of the sweater I was now taking off, only to reveal that my arms were completely bare except for those cuffs.
One afternoon, when I was nine and my brother was twelve, we were alone in the apartment, getting ready to go to our aunt’s house in Brooklyn for a big Passover dinner. Our parents were already there with our sister. Another relative, Aunt Evelyn, paid us a surprise visit. She just sat there in the kitchen with us for a while, acting sort of strange. Then she asked for the bread knife. I pointed out that there wasn’t any bread since we only had matzohs for the holiday.
Nevertheless, my brother, not wishing to offend, got her the bread knife. Then Aunt Evelyn went to one of the bedrooms, stood in the doorway and, holding the knife in stabbing position, she beckoned us: “Come here, I want to talk to you.” My brother obediently started walking in her dir
ection, but I ran out of the house, screaming, “Help! There’s a murderer in my house! There’s a murderer in my house!”
The neighbors sitting on the steps figured it must be another example of my perverted sense of humor, so they just ignored me. I ran to get the building superintendent, and he followed me back. The door was now locked, but the super used his shoulder as a battering ram and knocked the door right off its hinges. My brother and aunt were wrestling. The knife was on the floor, and his finger was bleeding.
The super subdued Aunt Evelyn and called the police. While a cop was holding her arms behind her back, I got brave and punched her in the stomach, saying, “You dirty murderer!” She looked at me, almost apologetically, and said, “It’s all because of your Uncle Pete.” Aunt Evelyn was my mother’s sister, and Uncle Pete was my father’s brother, but I didn’t know they had ever met.
My brother and I took the subway from Astoria to Brooklyn. We were the only ones on that entire train whose aunt had just tried to murder them. My brother told me how Aunt Evelyn had ordered him to put his pippy in her mouth or she’d cut it off. We had never guessed that she was so crazy. We were supposed to call Uncle Pete’s twin brother to pick us up at the subway station when we got to Brooklyn, but we were too scared. How did we know that he wasn’t also in on the plot? So instead, we got off the train and took a trolley car to our aunt’s house.
When we arrived, I began to spill out the whole scenario right there in the living room in front of all the relatives. They weren’t sure whether this was just another sleeveless-shirt hoax that I was describing, but when I got to the part about Aunt Evelyn standing in the bedroom doorway holding the bread knife, there were looks of frozen horror on everybody’s faces. My mother brought us upstairs to finish the rest of the story in private. Then my father gave my brother and me each a dollar bill.
“All right,” he said, “now forget about it.”
I took the dollar, but I didn’t exactly forget about it.
Incredibly, the cops let Aunt Evelyn go free. My father brought me to school for a few days until they found her wandering around the streets, and this time she was hospitalized.
I became an expert eavesdropper in my own home. My parents had both come from puritanical backgrounds, but I was finally able to gather from their conversations that Uncle Pete had seduced Aunt Evelyn as a teenager, and that fellatio was included in their relationship. My father referred to it as “playing the skin flute.” That was the closest that I ever came to understanding her motivation. But I did understand—without having the vocabulary to describe it to myself—that Mischa Goodman had one projection of me and Aunt Evelyn had another, but that neither projection had anything to do with me.
Although Aunt Evelyn was now hospitalized in a mental ward, I began to have dreams where all my other aunts—who were always naked, but they all had men’s pippies—were chasing after me with bread knives. I eventually learned to tell when I was dreaming by flapping my arms like wings. If I could fly, then I would know it was a dream and I could go right on dreaming without being afraid, or maybe even change it to a better dream. Sometimes that worked, but other times I dreamed that I wasn’t dreaming, that I really was flying, and it seemed perfectly natural. Then along would come a naked flying aunt with a bread knife and a dangling pippy, and that seemed perfectly natural too.
I developed a private ritual of lying on my side in bed at night and shaking my head against the pillow until I fell asleep. My mother took me to our family doctor to help me stop. He used to give me some kind of injection in the buttocks to help me stop separating my foreskin flap from my scrotum skin, and now I was grateful that he had no such treatment for my headshaking.
His prognosis: “He’ll get over it.”
When I confided in our family doctor that I wanted to stop playing the violin, he told me that it would be a sin to waste my God-given talent. But how could anyone else know what God meant for me to do? My God-given talent was to be a professional brat. At a concert, I would finish performing, then bow with my rear end to the audience, while Mischa Goodman sputtered with frustration. One day my brother and I went to his home for our violin lessons.
“Nice day for a murder,” I announced to his neighbors.
I was trying to drive Mischa Goodman crazy.
Meanwhile, George and I were invited to play our violins at various events—from the 1939 World’s Fair, where I witnessed television for the first time, to the dentist’s office, where my brother innocently played “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” which didn’t exactly help take the patient’s mind off the dentist’s drill. Once my father brought us and our violins to a marathon dance at a ballroom where his friend worked. It made no sense to me that all these couples would be deliberately dancing themselves to exhaustion. I was glad nobody asked us to play there.
George and I did everything together. We practiced “cross-fire”—simultaneously emptying our bladders with careful aim so that the two streams of urine would meet in the air and spray before reaching the toilet. We played paddle tennis in the park, and the loser would have to shine the winner’s shoes. He beat me every time. On the subway, when the train stalled between stops and there was silence, we would stand up like a pair of vaudevillians and recite jokes.
“Give me a pound of kidlies, please,” I’d say.
“You mean kidneys, don’t you?”
“I said kidlies, did’l I?”
We mined our jokes from a thick book, 2500 Jokes for All Occasions. I tried to read through the entire collection, but ultimately I got bored. What good were jokes if they couldn’t make you laugh? Then I discovered the world of comic books. Detective Comics with Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. Action Comics with Superman. One superhero after another—Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, The Human Torch, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Sub-Mariner, Johnny Thunderbolt, Crimebuster—they all helped to sustain my spirit of adventure. Vicarious adventure was better than no adventure at all, and I came to associate the feel of a dime in my hand with the smell of a new comic book.
George and I performed a few times on a Saturday morning radio show, “The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour.” Horn & Hardart ran the Automat restaurant chain. The older kids called it Horn & Hard-on. We all had to sing their theme song: “Less work for mother, just give her a hand. Less work for mother, and she’ll understand. She’s your greatest treasure, just make her life a pleasure, less work for mother, dear.” But they never even gave us a free lunch. Ralph Edwards was the regular host of the show, but this was Ed Herlihy’s debut. He called me “deadpan” on the air when I finished playing. I asked him what that meant.
“It’s because you didn’t smile,” he said.
“This is radio,” I reminded him. “They can’t see me.”
The radio had become my best friend. My favorite program was Edgar Bergen, with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Charlie was the pretentious city slicker, wearing a top hat and monocle. Mortimer was his naïve, freckle-faced, buck-toothed country cousin. I wore a Charlie McCarthy T-shirt and I ate with a Charlie McCarthy teaspoon. I realized that there was something bizarre about featuring a ventriloquist on radio, but it didn’t matter—they all sounded like different personalities. One time Bergen said, “Charlie, what are you doing?” And Charlie McCarthy replied, “Oh, nothing.” But Mortimer Snerd interjected in his goofy, innocent manner, “Well, then how d’ya know when yer finished?” It was a veritable Zen koan from the mouth of a wooden dummy.
Lionel Barrymore, who played the crippled Dr. Gillespie in the original Dr. Kildare movies, had a program where he would sit in his own wheelchair, spouting maxims and dispensing homilies. In his authoritative, quavering voice, he once said, “Happiness is not a station you’ll arrive at, it’s the train you’re traveling on.” That single sentence immediately became my complete philosophy of life. But, a few decades later, I would read in Hollywood is a Four Letter Town by James Bacon:Lionel Barrymore once told me, as he sat in his wheelchair crippled with arthr
itis, that he would have killed himself long ago if it hadn’t been for Louis B. Mayer: “L.B. gets me $400 worth of cocaine a day to ease my pain. I don’t know where he gets it. And I don’t care.
But I bless him every time it puts me to sleep.”
So happiness wasn’t a radio station you’d arrive at, it was the wheelchair you were traveling on, and for Lionel Barrymore, it must have been an express trip all the way.
Every week, I would be delighted by two particular shows, Jack Benny and Fred Allen. I believed that Jack Benny actually went down to his money vault, and that Fred Allen actually visited Allen’s Alley, and that they were both feuding in real life. When a photograph of them standing together appeared in the newspaper, a caption explained that the armed guards keeping them apart were not in view. I also believed, as Chiquita Banana sang, “You should never put bananas in the refrigerator—no-no, no-no!”
Bob Hope became instant folklore because he got away with telling dirty jokes on the radio, even though he was immediately cut off the air each time. “Meet me at the pawnshop,” he would say to a lady, “and you can kiss me under the balls.” Or she would ask him, “Do you have any meat for my dog?” And Hope would answer, “No, but I’ve got a bone for your pussy.” Or he would say about an actress, “When she was a little girl she swallowed a pin, but she didn’t feel a prick until she was eighteen.”
I didn’t need much sleep and listened to music on the radio almost all night, but softly so that it wouldn’t wake my brother. I began to worry that the world was going to run out of beautiful melodies. In school, I would entertain myself by writing down song titles. My list totaled more than six hundred songs. While the other students were paying attention to the teacher, I would be reciting romantic lyrics to myself: from “My Ideal” (Will I ever find the girl in my mind, the one who is my ideal?); from “Stardust” (. . . and each kiss an inspiration); from “Down in the Depths on the 90th Floor” (Even the janitor’s wife has a better love life than I).
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 2
