by Alan Alda
Sometimes I would show my father a sketch I thought I could perform in and he’d say gently, “No, that’s a little rough, Bub.” I had no idea what was rough about it. But his reaction would send me back to the sketch for a closer reading as I tried to piece together exactly what men and women did together that was so funny.
After the sketches, we would all get down on the living room carpet and shoot craps. I would stretch out next to Fifi, the stripper, as she pulled bunched-up dollars out of her purse and tossed them down when she was on a roll. She’d shake the dice and pitch them out with a gusto I was totally in love with. She took pleasure in her energy, and so did I.
I learned on that carpet the small but important point about gambling that you can’t count on it. One day, I wanted to buy my father a radio for his birthday, and I saw how easy it was to run up a few dollars into a large pile of money. So, to raise the money for the radio I invited one of my father’s friends to shoot craps with me. He said okay, and of course his experience gave him complete control of the betting. He let the session stretch out to an agonizing length as I slowly saw my few dollars disappear. Finally, I had nothing left, not even enough to buy my father a token gift. I had the broken heart of everyone who finds out for the first time that you can also lose. He looked at me very seriously and said, “You know, in gambling, when you lose, you lose. You can’t get it back. But I’ll make a deal with you. Just this once, I’ll let you have your money back if you promise never to gamble again.” There was never a promise more heartfelt or more quickly made—and mostly kept.
The carpet was where I got the best of my early education. It was where, on winter nights, I stretched out and listened to Fred Allen and Jack Benny. And I can smell now the dusty gray nap as I lay facedown listening to the recordings of Gershwin’s Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue. These were the working recordings from my father’s film in which he played Gershwin. Oscar Levant was at the piano in the recordings, and my father practiced for weeks to be able to play along on a dummy piano as Gershwin. This was the first music of its kind I had ever heard, and I listened to it over and over. It captivated me even more than “Pistol Packin’ Mama” had the year before.
It was on that carpet that I lay with books from the shelves and, propped on my elbows, read them for hours during long afternoons. The living room shelves must have been decorated with books by the yard, chosen mainly for their bindings. I pulled down dozens of large, beautiful red leather books called the Congressional Record. I was delighted to see they were written in dialogue, my favorite form, and I devoured them. I especially enjoyed the sarcasm these people used against one another, even after the elaborate show of courtesy to “the distinguished gentleman from Vermont.” These guys were funny.
And there were heavy leather-bound volumes of short stories by European writers, often about dragoons and their mistresses. I didn’t know what dragoons were and I couldn’t always follow what they were doing with their mistresses, but they seemed to have many of the same interests as the characters in burlesque sketches, so I felt at home. The carpet was my best school, and curiosity was my favorite teacher.
The most interesting discovery I made while I was poking around was in a little space not much bigger than a closet, off the living room. This was where my father went to write. His typewriter sat next to the stack of black books full of sketches. I went in one day and saw a sheet of paper in the typewriter. It was curled permanently around the black roller because, having had trouble getting past the first few lines of a novel he was writing, he’d left it there for weeks. But the sight of his typewritten words on the onionskin paper touched me and ignited me. I was eight years old, and for the first time I realized that writing was something you could sit down and do. Just by typing those few words, he’d opened my eyes to another world. I loved the courtroom sketches in the big black books, so I borrowed the typewriter and wrote a sketch about a judge. From then on, I knew I wanted to be a writer.
At nine, I knew I wanted to be an actor. The war was on and many lives were being changed by it, including mine.
Every Saturday night, my father drove to the Hollywood Canteen to entertain the troops passing through Los Angeles on their way to fight in the Pacific. Actors who could sing, dance, or do comedy would go onstage. The others would mingle with soldiers and sailors on the dance floor and try to boost their morale. They must have entertained hundreds of servicemen every night and fed them thousands of sandwiches a week. I could tell because my father came home late every Saturday with a huge cardboard box full of the heels of loaves of white bread, which we would feed to our three pigs the next day.
He could see how much I loved playing in the sketches with his friends, so he asked me if I’d like to go and do a routine with him one night at the Hollywood Canteen. There was no timidity on my part, and we started rehearsing on the rumpus room landing.
We worked on Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First.” He was Abbott and I was Costello. Rehearsing was fun. He let me find my own way. He didn’t tell me how to say the lines or even exactly what to say. It was a burlesque rehearsal, where the shape of it is laid down but there’s still room for improvisation. “You might want to repeat that a few times,” he said about one exchange between us. “As many times as you feel are right—usually three is good, but feel it out.” Like any amateur, I tended to shift from foot to foot, and I slowly moved away from him while I talked. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Try not to drift,” he said. With each rehearsal I got more confident, my energy more focused. I couldn’t wait to go on.
Then, suddenly, I was standing in the dark in the wings at the Hollywood Canteen. In a few minutes, I would be going onstage. My father was at the microphone. He sang a couple of songs and did a few jokes.
A little old man is crossing the street and suddenly, out of nowhere, a truck comes by and knocks him down. A block later, the driver shouts out the window, “Watch out!” The little old man gets up on one elbow and says, “What’s the matter, you’re coming back?”
The audience laughed. When I heard this joke, I knew I’d be going out there in a few seconds. The laughter from the audience sent a rush of adrenaline through my body. I began shaking uncontrollably. There were people out there. I looked for comfort in the familiar. My fingers scanned the grain of the baseball bat I’d use as a prop, but my hands were wet and clammy on the wood. Now my father was pointing toward me and saying my name. I had to go out there. I put the bat over my shoulder and walked out to welcoming applause from the audience. This didn’t relax me. The applause meant they were watching me. I was under scrutiny. A follow spot picked me up and blinded me as I met my father at the microphone. They quieted down, waiting to see what this chubby nine-year-old with buck teeth and a butch haircut would come up with. My father said his first line. I said mine, and there was a laugh. A couple of lines later, there was an even bigger laugh. The spotlight began to feel warm. I was starting to like the attention of a room full of hundreds of people. The sound of their laughter was explosive, but I could control these explosions. I could make them laugh, and if I wanted, I could stop their laughter and make them listen. The trembling was over. The laughs rolled in on waves. By the end of the sketch, I was shaking again—not with fright, but with excitement. I’d conquered them, a roomful of civilians. A roomful of civilians in uniforms. I had found my place on the warm side of the footlights. Now I was part of the brotherhood.
But it wasn’t enough to keep out the rest of the world. Even among our gang, it turned out, there were the mirthless ones who didn’t live to please and be pleased; these were the ones whose pleasure came from your not getting any. The bullies.
The first time I saw a bully in action, in fact, it was Maxie, one of the comics. Maxie had become a writer in Hollywood and now made a living stealing from the old sketches and turning them into routines for radio shows. He was married to Gail. And one night I found out how Gail’s nose had been broken so many times.
I was in
the backseat of the family car. My father, my mother, and Gail were in the front seat. We were in front of Gail’s house, getting ready to drive off, and Maxie came over to the open window on the passenger side of the car.
“So, you’re going?” he said to Gail.
“We’re going for a drive,” Gail said.
“You’re going for a drive?” he said. “Really?”
“That’s right,” she said. “We’re going for a drive.”
“You bitch,” Maxie said. He reached through the window and made a short, precise stab of his fist to her face. Her hand went to her nose, and Maxie aimed another short punch right where it would cause the most pain. Instinctively, my mother reached across Gail and tried to protect her.
“Stop it,” my mother said, but he was already aiming a third punch at Gail’s face and it caught my mother in the hand. “You’ve hurt me!” my mother said, and Maxie, who I suppose did not think he had a license to hit other people’s wives, took a step back. Under his breath, he told Gail again that she was a bitch and we drove off.
The broken bone on the back of my mother’s hand started to rise almost immediately and never returned to normal. The mark of Maxie stayed on her hand, and it never left my mind.
Maxie and Gail were strange and frightening, but I had seen other strange things and I was okay as long as I could wake up every morning and explore my world. Karl Thalhammer, who used to own the property and now lived in the guesthouse, was the inventor of something called the Thalhammer Tripod. He kept supplies of metal rods and electric motors in the garage. Rooting around in there, I found a few pieces of metal tubing and a tiny motor I lusted after. I was too timid to ask for them, but not too timid to filch them. I soldered them together into my own version of a malted-milk machine. My parents proudly showed Karl my invention one day, and he looked at it admiringly, then turned to me. “You know,” he said, “if you had asked for those parts, I would have given them to you.” You could measure how long I would remember that moment by the redness of my cheeks.
My father saw that I liked projects and taught me how to make lamps out of Chianti bottles. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. After a while, there were Chianti bottle lamps with wine labels shellacked onto their shades all over the house. My father loved projects, too. He sent away for manuals from the Department of Agriculture in Washington and taught himself to transplant olive trees. He couldn’t stop, either. Soon he had installed dozens of giant stumps of the trees up and down our driveway. He had me digging holes and cutting taproots with him, but after a while it seemed too much like work. Instead, I spent weeks raking stones, making a path around a two-acre pasture, so I could ride my horse on a track. My father was a little disappointed that I would put so much effort into my obsession and not his. “If I had asked you to work that hard, you wouldn’t have done it,” he said. Well, sure. Other people’s obsessions are boring.
I finally gave up on the horse anyway, because he hated me. No matter where I wanted to go, he would head for the barn at a gallop and deliberately bang my leg against the fence post or head for the pasture and try to clip me in the chin with a tree branch. I rode bareback, and this would send me reeling. Once, on the way into the pasture at full gallop, I saw the branch coming, felt the thud on my chin, and woke up on the ground to the sight of him munching grass as if he were a loyal steed waiting patiently while I took a nap. I hated him as much as he hated me, and I switched to riding the donkey. He was no bargain, either. He would wait until he had carried me to a desolate spot and then start bucking. Once, beyond the eucalyptus trees, on the spot where we had tried to bury my dog, he threw me over his head, stepped on my arm, and ran away. After one of the pigs bit my little finger while I was feeding him hay, there wasn’t an animal on the place I trusted, except the chickens, and they smelled.
Most of the time, though, I lived in a world of imagination. I would draw pictures of fanciful inventions, like a five-way can opener or a lazy Susan that would go inside a refrigerator and make the contents easy to reach at the touch of your hand. (I worked out the future advertising copy, too.) Sometimes I would just lie on my back for hours and watch the clouds, and sometimes I would hurl myself into impossible projects. When I was eleven, I subscribed to Mechanix Illustrated and read every word. I paid particular attention to the classified ads. It interested me that people could write them so cleverly that they could snare other people into sending in their money. But as much as I could see through the “get rich quick” schemes and useless products they offered, there was one ad I couldn’t resist.
I saved up my allowance money and sent away for a mail-order course in taxidermy.
When the first installment arrived, I tore open the envelope excitedly and read it: detailed instructions on how to stuff a bird. This was compelling reading. Now I could do what the Hollywood taxidermist had failed to do with Rhapsody. A few days later, I found a dead owl on the property and brought him into the house. I laid him on the kitchen table next to the open pages of lesson one and started following the directions. Make an incision from the neck to the tail and remove the innards.
With a kitchen knife, I made the incision and split open the bird. And there were the innards. I had never seen the inside of a living thing before. There was a lot of stuff in there, and most of it was gooey. I read ahead in the lesson and saw that after I took care of the innards, I would have to cure the skin and make a wire frame for the body. I decided to concentrate on the frame and get back to the innards later.
The dead owl lay on the kitchen table for about a week. It began to smell, and when you passed by it, if you peeked into the chest cavity, you could see little white maggots climbing all over one another. Finally, my mother said, “Are you going to do anything more with this?”
I said I had decided to wait for the next installment, and we threw out the owl. The next installment, though, required a dead mountain lion, which I skipped as well. After that, the animals I would need to find got bigger and the stuffing of them got more complicated. The final chapter called for a moose and required tanning its immense hide and pulling it over a superstructure of metal pipes. I read the booklet twice, amazed at what people will go through to stuff something.
Meanwhile, I was trying as deftly as I could to avoid being stuffed by my mother. She tried both to hang on to a past me and to shape a future me that fit some crazy ideal. As for the past me, she would often tell me that something happened to me when I was six. I used to want to be with her wherever she went and say, “I wuv you, Momay.” Then I changed. And after that I spoke differently and stopped following her into the bathroom. I don’t know why, but this seemed like normal development to me. To her, it was a kind of betrayal.
As for the future me, she decided one day when I was eleven that it was time for me to learn about where babies come from and that I should learn it in such a healthy, positive way that I would be happy and well-adjusted all my life. So we sat by the pool and she opened a book and started reading aloud. Every few paragraphs she would stop and tell me how wonderful sex was. “Woooonderful,” she said, looking heavenward. This was intended to make me well-adjusted; however, it didn’t seem odd to her that a friend of mine, a boy a year older than me, was also there, lying on his back, listening raptly with his hand on his crotch. Didn’t she see him, legs splayed, right in front of her? Didn’t she think it was a strange posture to assume while attending a sex lecture by someone’s mother? What was reality for her? Finally it was over, but it was one more step in a new direction. Little by little, I was beginning to realize I was on my own.
In the seventh grade, the supply of tutors dried up completely and I had to go to school a few miles away in a town called Tujunga. Tujunga didn’t sound good, and it wasn’t. I would have to travel by bus each morning to get there, which meant I would no longer be traveling with a group that played cards and drank all night. God knows what these people from the outside world did to amuse themselves. As it turned out, they amused themselves by
acting like Maxie.
On my first journey into that world, my first day of school, I went down the long dirt drive to the main road. I walked past the stumps of olive trees I’d helped my father transplant. Their new shoots had sprouted and had begun to grow into trunks themselves. Out on the main road, I stood beside our large rural mailbox and waited for the school bus. The bus came by and I got on. I noticed that one of the boys on the bus seemed to be glaring at me. I made it through the first day in which people were mostly indifferent to me, but that would change soon. The next morning, when I made my way down the long driveway, the same boy who glared at me on the bus was standing by my mailbox.
“Listen, you little son of a bitch,” he said by way of a greeting. “If you think I’m going to walk down here to your mailbox every day to wait for the bus, you can shove it up your ass. You wait in front of my mailbox, or else I’ll wipe your face up and down this road. You understand that?”
I nodded that I did. Actually, he’d been exceptionally clear. His mailbox was a two-minute walk up the road, and if I thought that being some shit actor’s little boy entitled me to any special favors, I could shove that up my ass, too. It couldn’t be clearer. But I didn’t know why he was saying this. Had someone told him to wait by my mailbox? Had he assumed he would someday be asked to wait there? I decided not to question him on this. It didn’t look like he was taking questions.
The next morning, and every morning for the rest of the year, I walked the tenth of a mile to his mailbox. We stood by the bridge over the dry riverbed and waited for the bus while he explained to me what a piece of shit I was in fine detail. He seemed to enjoy talking not only about my shittiness, but about his father’s temper and the beatings he got if he stepped out of line. He seemed proud to be able to endure them. And he seemed interested in looking for a way to transfer them to someone else. He was a head taller than me and spoke so effortlessly in a tone of hatred that I said nothing. I put most of my effort into not trembling, which didn’t work. I trembled.
