Instead of practicing the violin, I would read comic books. I would be standing in the bedroom with the door closed, violin in hand and a comic book on the music stand, but whenever I’d hear my mother approaching, I would quickly shove the comic book under my pillow and start playing the violin. Mischa Goodman wanted me to practice each piece ten times, marking X’s on a sheet of paper to keep count. I hated practicing, so on the subway I would mark ten X’s on a scrap of paper which I would then show to Mischa Goodman, and he would assure me that I was playing much better as a result.
But I kept hearing the voice of Mortimer Snerd asking, “How d’ya know when yer finished?” The answer finally came when Mischa Goodman died. I went into the subway with my violin and my mother’s enamel measuring cup attached to my belt. I walked through the train playing the “Mendelssohn Concerto.” With the money that passengers eagerly put into my cup, I bought potato chips, vanilla fudge with walnuts, and the sheet music for “Intermezzo,” which I taught myself to play. I performed it for my parents. Then I put my violin in the closet and vowed never to play it again.
I simply decided to stop shaking my head at night when I went to summer camp, because I knew the other kids wouldn’t be as tolerant as my brother, who was in a bunk for older boys. At home, one of my classmates used to force me to play his skin flute in the stairwell behind the mailboxes, and now at camp, when I confided to my counselor about that, he forced me to play his skin flute. I still didn’t even know what sperm was for. The next day I asked my counselor if I was still eligible for the Clean Camper Award, and he chased me around a field until he caught me. Then he kept punching me on the arm.
I also got in trouble at camp for wearing my Charlie McCarthy T-shirt, because it had a tar stain that never came out in the wash. They wouldn’t let me come to lunch unless I changed to another T-shirt. On the way back to my bunk, I was feeling weird. I noticed an apple core on the ground, but when I bent down to pick it up and throw it away, there was a second apple core right next to it. I was seeing double. Back at my bunk, I looked in the mirror. My left eyeball was all the way over to the left corner of my eye, and I couldn’t move it back to the middle. No matter where I looked with my right eye, my left eye stayed in the corner. Now I was really in trouble. I ran all the way back to the mess hall with my left eye closed.
The camp director called my parents, and my brother and I were put on a train and sent back home. Our family doctor referred me to a specialist, who diagnosed my condition as bulbar polio—infantile paralysis—which was generally associated with the inability to use a limb. I was placed in a hospital, where the standard treatment consisted of applying hot compresses to a paralyzed arm or leg. They couldn’t do that with my eye, but they kept me quarantined in the polio ward at the hospital anyway.
I was twelve years old and still believed that babies were purchased at the hospital. Ironically, it was there in the hospital that I found out where babies actually came from, and how they got there in the first place. Since I was the most mobile kid in the ward, I acted as a courier of comic books, bringing them from one bed to another, and it was while trading comics that I became informed about the bizarre practice of sexual intercourse.
The nurses were furious that I had been walking freely around the ward. They put me into a straitjacket so that I couldn’t get out of my bed. That night, when everything was quiet but nobody was asleep yet, I said in a very loud whisper, referring to a comic-strip character, “Barney Google eats Pillsbury Farina.” It worked. The other kids immediately got a case of hysterical giggles. But what could the nurses do? I was already in a straitjacket. Would they go so far as to put adhesive tape over my mouth?
The next day I got discharged from the hospital.
My paralyzed eye had to be exercised frequently at home. Several times each day my mother would patiently move a pencil horizontally in front of my left eye, over and over, while I would try to make the muscle work by following the path of the pencil, keeping my right eye closed. I couldn’t fake this like practicing the violin. During that year, my left eyeball gradually moved toward the center.
Most of the time I wore a black patch over my good eye in order to strengthen my weak eye. Other kids called me Paul the Pirate. Eventually my left eyeball returned to its normal position, but the pupil remained larger, and the sight in that eye continued to be blurry. When I finally recounted to my classmates the details of my revised sex education—how the men’s seeds impregnated the women’s eggs—they thought I was making it up.
“Get outta here! Eggs?”
My new knowledge also got me in trouble when my brother and I did a joke for the relatives before a big family dinner.
“If your mother and father had a fight,” he asked, “who would you stick up for?”
“I’d stick up for my father—he stuck it up for me.”
And I got slapped in the face by one of my sane aunts.
My social skills were not well developed. While I was focused on the mystery of why we were here on earth, and the inconceivability of infinite time and space, everyone else seemed to be concerned with the details of daily living. I found it hard to communicate, yet I wanted to participate in their world. I sent away for the Ethel Cotton Conversation Course. When it arrived, I asked my standard question, “Is this what God intended?” The answer was no, and I returned the package. Instead, I eavesdropped on people talking, and I started to keep a list of handy clichés.
My favorite—a rhetorical question which I always took literally—was, “Whattaya gonna do?”
The Broadway movie theater was just a block away from our house. On the side of the building, the ladies’ bathroom had a window that was usually open a few inches. I used to stand outside and peek in. Although I could see nothing but a pair of shoes on the floor of one particular stall, I kept indulging in voyeurism for its own sake.
Every Saturday afternoon, my brother and I would pack a lunch and go to the movies. For a dime, you could see a double feature, a newsreel, and twenty-four animated cartoons, plus a serial episode and the weekly race, with different stereotypes—a fat guy, a colored guy, a Chinese guy—running, riding a motorcycle, hijacking a hay-wagon, triumphing with slapstick speed over one obstacle after another. The whole audience screamed with excitement. And if the number you received when you bought your ticket matched the number of the first one to cross the finish line, you’d win a prize.
Occasionally a group of us guys would go to the Astoria Theater, which was further away but featured a live stage show between the movies. We would start clapping in the middle of a tap-dance act in response to a simple step, just to observe the applause spread through the audience.
After Errol Flynn was charged with statutory rape, we all went to see his latest movie and cheered when he appeared on the screen. Statutory meant only that the seventeen-year-old girl was underage—“jailbait”—but we didn’t really consider it rape because it was voluntary.
Once a drunk lady sat next to me at the movies and started playing with my pippy, but the other guys sat behind us and heckled. Actually, I was relieved by their interruption, since I wasn’t mature enough to ejaculate. When there was a circle jerk—a few of us would meet on the roof or at somebody’s house—I pretended that I had an orgasm by gathering saliva in my mouth and emptying it into my hand when nobody was looking.
Meanwhile, my brother had obtained nude photos of movie stars like Rita Hayworth or Burt Lancaster, which we sold for seventy-five cents each. This was a long way from the time when we performed magic shows and charged a penny admission. When our parents were out, my brother and sister and I would examine each other’s naked bodies. It was a form of sex education. George and I even had Marge sign a piece of paper promising to continue this practice in the future, when she would develop breasts and grow pubic hair. Although it was something to look forward to, we never held her to that agreement.
Marge and I were not really friends yet. She had a piano scholarship and pract
iced a lot. One winter, she found a Christmas tree, carried it up the elevated subway steps—she wasn’t allowed to cross the street—dragged the tree past the change booth and down the other steps on our block. We never had a Christmas tree in the house before, but after all that trouble, my mother couldn’t deny her the pleasure.
George and I had different approaches to leisure. I only read comic books, but he read the entire dictionary. I thought dancing was for sissies, but he bought a bottle of Brylcreem hair tonic and sent in the boxtop for a free copy of Arthur Murray’s Dance Book, with diagrams of shoes, and arrows indicating how to do different dance steps. He tried to teach me the Fox Trot, but it was too mechanical for my taste. I thought dancing was just a poor substitute for sex.
One night, when I was dreaming about that drunk lady who played with my pippy in the Broadway Theater, I had my first nocturnal emission. Never again would I have to pretend that I ejaculated. Now I only had to fake conversation.
I had my own private religion, including my own personal prayer.
“Please, God,” it began, “let’s win and prevent all these wars.” World War II was in progress. Novelty shops were selling rolls of toilet tissue with pictures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito on alternate squares, with the slogan Wipe Out the Axis! My prayer continued: “May all my loved ones live long, healthy, happy, complete lives, and may all their loved ones live long, healthy, happy, complete lives.” Then, to win extra brownie points for courtesy, I would always add, “Excuse me. Please. Thank you, God,” while making a circle with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, the other fingers sticking out—this was also the symbol for ordering a Ballantine beer or a frozen Milky Way—and along with that gesture, I would wink at God just to keep it all on an informal, friendly basis.
According to my eclectic theology—a mixture of cultural superstition and health folklore—if you were eating a cookie and it fell to the ground, you could still pick it up and eat it without getting poisoned if you first touched it to your puckered lips and said, “I kiss it up to God.” In rainy weather, if you wore galoshes over your shoes at the movies, it was bad for your eyes. If you sat on a toilet during an electric storm, lightning could strike you by coming up through the plumbing. If you bit your fingernails and swallowed them, it could cause appendicitis. My brother used to bite his fingernails, and my mother would apply a bitter-tasting liquid, gentian violet, to his nails. I developed a macho habit of spitting on the sidewalk instead, but my parents had no medicine to discourage me. Wherever I stood on the sidewalk, there would be a design of saliva spots left in that place.
Although I didn’t consider myself Jewish, the bullies who picked fights with me did. I would sneak off to Hebrew School with my books hidden under my sweater. I challenged the rabbi on the ethics of circumcision. He had a stammer and said that “a b-b-briss is a c-c-covenant with G-G-God.”
“A covenant should be voluntary,” I argued.
“It b-b-began as a c-c-covenant,” he said. “It b-b-became an ob-ob-obligation.”
For my bar mitzvah, I rewrote the generic speech provided by the synagogue and thanked my parents for nurturing me through my illness. There was one point in the ceremony where my father was supposed to repeat what the rabbi said in Hebrew. “B-b-baruch atoy adon-n-noy . . .” My father innocently repeated what the rabbi said, complete with stutter. The congregation snickered, and you could almost see the steam coming out of the rabbi’s ears as he chastised my father for making fun of him. Our relatives called out, “He didn’t do it on purpose!” “He doesn’t speak Hebrew!” “Leave him alone!”
Fountain pens were a traditional bar mitzvah gift, but ballpoint pens were new on the market, and I was given one which was guaranteed to last for six years. I figured that it would see me through the rest of junior high school and all through high school without running out of ink.
That’s how naïve I was.
Attached to our kitchen ceiling, directly over the table, there was a rack with several horizontal lines of rope. It could be lowered by a pulley. My mother would hang wet laundry on those ropes with clothespins and bring the rack back up—but not when we were eating, or the clothes would drip on our food. Cockroaches would roam leisurely across the ropes. Once a cockroach lost its balance and fell kerplunk right into my split-pea soup.
We also had mice. And mousetraps. My task was to empty a trap whenever a mouse got caught. I didn’t want to touch the dead mouse, so I would pick up the trap with a pair of pliers, release the spring with a screwdriver, drop the dead mouse into a paper bag with an apology, and throw the bag away in a trash can outside. If the mouse had been caught by the tail and was still alive, I would set it free in the basement.
In the middle of our rectangular-shaped apartment house, there was an open courtyard surrounding an oval-shaped garden, with tunnels on two sides that led to the sidewalk. There were stairway entrances at each inner corner of the buiIding. I used to ride my bicycle around and around the border of the garden, singing—“Oh, I love the life I lead, and I lead the life I love”—over and over and over. I would always pedal slowly in case a neighbor was coming through one of the tunnels from the sidewalk.
“Stop going around in circles,” a neighbor called out from her window. “You’re making me dizzy.”
One summer, at a field day on the local high school athletic grounds, there was a variety of competitive events, but only one really appealed to me—the slow bicycle race. After all, I had been inadvertently training for it, and was now in top form. You had to ride your bicycle as slowly as possible for about a hundred feet without turning or zigzagging. If your foot touched the ground you were automatically disqualified. Whoever came in last would be declared the winner.
The starting whistle blew. Fortunately I got off to a slow start. Now the trick was to remain behind. It was as if I had studied Zen in the Art of Slow Bicycle Riding. I became my bicycle. I was at one with the seat, the handlebars, the chain that drove the wheel. Pushing gently on the pedals, I gradually increased the distance between myself and the rest of the contestants until I was far enough behind them that it became obvious I would reach the finish line last. In an ordinary race, others could catch up to you, but here they would have to slow down.
Even though I hadn’t crossed the finish line yet, I was so far behind now that it was inevitable I would win. The spectators were all cheering me on. There was no way I could lose, as long as I kept my balance. I felt absolutely exhilarated. But there was always the Unknown—that irrational, unpredictable, Aunt Evelyn factor—allowing you to take nothing for granted. Just when you thought you were in perfect harmony with the universe, Fate might suddenly intervene like a gigantic fist in the sky, punching at you through the clouds, as a disembodied voice boomed:
“Oh, yeah? Pow! Pow! Pow!”
So the only thing to do was savor the experience. Whether or not I came in last, I was already the winner of the slow bicycle race.
My mother used to walk right into the bathroom while I was taking a bath, and when I finally complained, she said, pointing to my groin area, “I’ll stop coming in when you grow hair down there.”
I became obsessed with pubic hair, it was so taboo. My brother and I would go to Brighton Beach and stroll around on the sand, sneaking glances at sleeping ladies in the hope of finding a few stray curlicues of that forbidden pubic hair peeking out from their various and sun-dried crotches. And if we spotted any, it felt as though we’d had a real productive afternoon.
We went to Steeplechase, a unique outdoor amusement park in Coney Island. To enter, you had to walk under the toothy smile of this tremendous joker face named George C. Tilyou. Then you’d stumble through a large rotating barrel, losing your balance and your change. There were all kinds of rides, games of chance or skill, and refreshment stands outside, plus an indoor arena with more rides.
There was one where you’d climb up a ladder, go down a spiral slide, and land on one of several revolving turntables. You had t
o keep your arms crossed to avoid getting wood-burn. On another ride, you started out in the center of this large round thing that rotated so fast you would be pulled to the side and held against the wall by centrifugal force even when the floor was lowered. You hoped you wouldn’t throw up from the hot dog and malted milk and French-fried potatoes you’d eaten, because the vomit would only fly right back in your face, unless you turned your head at just the right instant. Timing was important.
There was a little theater at one end of the arena. You could sit in the audience, eat your lunch and watch, not actors, but regular people, who kept coming out of a door onto the stage, which was like a miniature fun house. They would have to walk across a wooden platform that jiggled and shook, struggling not to fall down. There was a one-inch-diameter hole in the floor which emitted a spout of air that would blow up a woman’s skirt as she passed over that portion of the stage, and the audience would applaud.
Occasionally someone wouldn’t be wearing panties or a bathing suit underneath, and there’d be a flash of her pubic hair. Then the audience would applaud with extra appreciation. Some women knew what to expect, and they would hold their skirts down, but for this contingency there was a dwarf dressed in a clown costume and wearing makeup that made him look hostile, waiting on stage for them.
He had an electric cattle prod, and he would buzz a woman in the buttocks so that her hands would instinctively go toward the shock, letting go of her skirt. Then the air spout would be effective again. Even though I was obsessed with pubic hair, I was offended by this particular method of revealing it. Once again, I asked myself, “Is this what God intended?” My parents had told me to act normal, but I was confused by what passed for normalcy.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 3
