"Ow. Shit man. Time out! Nobody walk here. My balls are here somewhere. Why did you hit me in the balls, munchkin? Why did you hit me in the balls?"
I gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, it was to his balls, and they threw me out of the game for an intentional foul. That was the bad part. The good part was the Indiana Pacers called and said I'm their kind of guy.
After the game, everybody came over to the house: the team, cheerleaders, friends. 549 was always the hangout house. People just loved to come over, and my mother would cook for everybody. There must have been fifty people there, and it was always okay that she stayed. Usually if there was a party at a friend's house and the parents were there, we would figure out ways to get rid of them; not her. She was hip about it too. If there was a make-out party, she'd work the lights.
CHAPTER 11
A few weeks after Dad had passed away, and everybody had gone, when it was just the two of us, Mom took me into my room in the back, closed the door and said, "Billy, listen. I want to talk to you about something."
"What, Ma?"
"When it's time, and it's going to come sooner than you think, you're going to get to go away to college. I don't want you to worry about that."
"Mom, I don't have to go away. I'll get a job, and go to night school. I really don't have to go away."
"No, Billy. I want you to go. It's important for you that you go. Joel went away . . . Rip went away . . . I love you all the same. You'll have the same chance that they had."
"But Mom, the money . . ."
"Don't worry about that. I'll make it work, I promise you. I want you to go." And she became the greatest hero I will ever know in my life. My mom was fifty years old when my father died in front of her like that. Fifty. A woman who had to grow up, with a boy who couldn't help but grow up, and two others, who were still in college. She kept us together.
Uncle Milt came up with an idea to stage a big benefit concert for us at the Central Plaza, in December, just the way Dad had done for his players' families when they passed on. It was gigantic, all these great musicians in a nonstop show that went on for hours and hours. They raised something like five or six thousand dollars, but it disappeared with the guy who coordinated the evening. Shocking, somebody stealing this money from a widow and her kids. They never saw him again.
We had nothing. But like her father, Mom had "a plan." She started taking the train in from Long Beach into Manhattan round-trip every day. An hour each way, a tough commute for anybody. But when you're fifty and you've got that boulder to carry around, it's a little tougher.
Her plan was simple. She began to study at a secretarial school, to learn shorthand, typing and dictation so she could get a job as a secretary. She hadn't had a nine-to-five job since her days at Macy's in the thirties.
She'd had the toughest of all jobs, of course, raising three children, but now it all depended on her, and she never complained. Mom was very matter-of-fact about life, this was how it was. I knew inside she was hurting, but she rarely let us see it. If she was weak, what would we think?
When we'd all be together, we'd go into Wing Loo, and when they'd ask, "How many in your party?" she would look them in the eye and say, "Four." I knew it was killing her, because it was killing me. I was always thinking, There's one empty chair.
When she got home from the City, I would do her homework with her. I would read her the sample business letters. I would do the dictation with her, and she would get it down in that crazy shorthand language. Then she'd have to type the letters for time on a typewriter. (Remember typewriters?) Get one thing wrong, or the keys stuck together, she'd have to start all over again.
"Time . . . Mom, that's only forty-eight words a minute. You have to get up to around sixty-five or seventy words per minute if you're going to compete for a job. Come on. Give it your best shot."
I would push aside my homework to help her with hers. After a few months of this, she was typing at seventy-five words a minute and she got a job, not just as a secretary, which would have been fine. She got a job as an office manager in Mineola, Long Island, at a Nassau County psychiatric clinic, which was perfect for me. Free samples. And during this dark time, she never complained, and she always had a sense of humor.
She'd come home from the clinic . . .
"Mom, you look tired."
"Oh, it's these damn schizophrenics. You have to bill them twice."
I graduated high school, and soon I would go away to college. Mom had put aside $2,500 so I could go. That may not seem like a lot to you, but she was only making $7,500 a year. I helped out a little bit too. I was going to Marshall University in West Virginia to be their next second baseman, because I could hit the curveball to right field. I was seventeen when I left to go away to college, a young seventeen in many ways, and a very old seventeen in a lot of ways. And I'd never been away from home.
I also never had the chance to have the "birds and the bees" speech with my dad. We never got to it--that almost mystical talk, when fathers hand their sons the baton of the relay race that is life. We did have the one talk about The Girl, but it wasn't the one I wanted . . . So right before I got on the plane at La Guardia Airport, Eastern Air Lines, Gate 33, I had the birds and the bees speech with my mom.
"Billy, dear, before you go, about the girls--"
"Mom, I know."
"I'm so glad we had this talk."
We held on to each other for as long as we could as they announced my departure. I just didn't want to let go. It's tough to say goodbye to your heroes. But then there's a moment when you know you have to go. Something in your mind goes off, and it's suddenly okay. Because if you raise your kids right, they should go. I walked to the plane and never looked back, and then I heard three words that she would yell after me that would change my entire freshman year at school.
"DON'T WASH WOOL!"
I got down to Huntington, West Virginia, and the first day of school was a total disaster. They cancel the freshman baseball program because of a funding problem. This was years before freshmen could play varsity, so that was it, there would be no baseball for me. Suddenly, I'm simply a Jew in West Virginia. The only Jew in West Virginia it felt like sometimes. I had never felt hatred before.
A local restaurant wouldn't serve me after the counterman saw my Jewish Star hanging around my neck. Though my roommate, Michael, and I got along really well, I learned very quickly that there was a big world outside Long Beach.
I was shy and quiet without baseball, lonely, and still thinking about The Girl. But then I got involved with the campus radio station WMUL, and started spending time there doing my own show called Just Jazz. The jazz library at WMUL was nonexistent; Roy Clark was considered a jazz artist there. So, I called Uncle Milt, and he sent me some great albums, and I took a chance and wrote to the great John Hammond, the head of Columbia Records. Dad always had the nicest things to say about him, and I just decided to go for it. I told him, I was Jack's son, and Milt's nephew, and about Roy Clark. He sent me fifty of the classic Columbia records: Miles and Brubeck and Ella and Billie . . . a starter set of the masters. He also sent the Columbia catalogue (mail order, thank you Uncle Milt), with the opportunity to buy any album in it for a dollar. We exchanged a few letters, and he said to come in to meet him, maybe for a summer job. I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to thank him personally. He was a giant in the industry, and really helped me out.
Not only was it fun to be a deejay, but I found it so comforting to go into the station and just listen to jazz. I lived in the Pritchard Hotel in Huntington, nine blocks off campus, overlooking the train station. The school had rented two floors to serve as a dorm.
Michael and I had the smallest room on the eleventh floor. It was so tiny. It was either that, or that damn boulder was still too big. I took it with me everyplace I went. Call me a slow healer but it hadn't even been two years, and, with the exception of my radio show, I had a tough time having fun.
Once a week I called home. Sundays n
ow became our phone call day. After eight o'clock at night it was cheaper, so that's when I would call. I never told Mom it was hard for me, because I didn't want her to worry. I always tried to keep her spirits up, even though mine were falling. I don't think I ever fooled her, because my uncles would call and write, and Grandma, and my brothers of course, and my cousins even.
It was so great to get a letter. I felt like one of those actors in those war movies when someone brings a letter from home out to the battlefield: "Is that for me?" It taught me that family is not just the family that you grew up under the same roof with, it's your whole family. Then one day I got a package in the mail, which totally confused me because it was the only package I got all year that didn't have a salami in it.
It was from California: Hollywood, California. I didn't know anyone in California. I'd never been to California. The furthest west I'd ever been was Eighth Avenue at the old Madison Square Garden.
I opened it up and it was a book from Sammy Davis, Jr., who I had never met. Uncle Milt had been recording him. He did Sammy's first gold record, "Hey There" from The Pajama Game. A note from Uncle Milt was attached to the front of the book. It said he had written to Sammy about me. He told Sammy that he thought that I had something, but that I also had "the otherness." He signed it as he signed all his letters to me, "Keep thrillin' me, Uncle Milt."
I opened it up, and Sammy had signed the book to me. I could hear his voice as I read: "To Billy, you can do it, too. The best, Sammy Davis, Jr."
I came home for the summer of l966, and got a job as a counselor in a day camp at the Malibu Beach Club in Lido Beach. One day after work, I was on the beach with my good friend Steve Kohut, and this really cute girl in a bikini with a fantastic walk goes by, and I said, "Who's that?"
"That's Janice Goldfinger," Steve said. "She just moved here."
I said, "I'm going to marry her."
We started dating, and I was in love. This was bigger and better than any feeling I'd ever had in my life. We were perfect together. She was beautiful in a way that was actually touching. I was only eighteen, and she was seventeen, but I wanted her forever. We were kids, but there was something about Janice that screamed at me, DON'T LET HER GO.
Her kindness was in everything she did. She was charming, and she was sexy, and she made me laugh. Most important, I didn't feel the otherness when I was with her. The day before I was supposed to leave to go back to Marshall, I decided not to. I knew if I left, she and I would never make it. Those long-distance romances never seem to work out.
I talked to Mom, and after she heard what was in my heart, she didn't try to change my mind. Mom would always tell me if she thought I was making a mistake. Not this time. I gave up my chance to play college ball for Marshall, and even though I knew it would be a better year, and it was a nice place, I just finally felt, Janice was too important in my life, and West Virginia was a little too "off-Broadway" for me.
So I enrolled at Nassau Community College in Garden City, Long Island, a two-year commuter school, to get my grades up, and as an elective, I took acting. That was it. I started acting in plays, and singing and dancing in musicals, even directing some. Nassau had a fantastic theater program, and I threw myself into it.
There was a great group of talented actors and actresses, with strong and creative teachers. I started to understand the process of doing real and honest acting work. We started our own summer stock company, which is how I got my Actors' Equity card. I got to direct and act in a production of The Fantasticks that starred my brother Rip as El Gallo. Rip had been singing professionally. He had been a regular chorus member on NBC's Kraft Music Hall and was getting parts in cabaret shows in New York.
The school was built on an old Air Force base, and we renovated one of the massive old airplane hangars into an indoor/outdoor theater. We could open the huge doors of the hangar and the audience would actually sit on the runway of the old airstrip. We would do straight plays and musicals, with a full orchestra, for crowds of over two thousand people. Once again, Rip joined me (along with Janice), as we starred in Finian's Rainbow. Janice played Susan the Silent and I was the Leprechaun, and when I sang "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love" to her, and we danced together, there wasn't a dry eye in the hangar.
It was a special time in my life. I knew that a career as a performer was what I wanted. I don't think I have ever stopped working on my skills since those great days at Nassau Community College.
Four years after I told Steve Kohut, "I'm going to marry that girl," I did. After Janice and I got married in 1970, we lived upstairs at 549 (Abe and Estelle had left). We lived above Mom for about four years, and it was so nice to have sex in the house with somebody who wasn't me. We've been married thirty-five years now, so I guess I made the right decision.
Fifteen years into our marriage and two daughters later (Jenny and Lindsay), in the middle of my career, I'm back in New York to do Saturday Night Live. I went to my high school 20th reunion. It's 1985 and the Class of 1965 is together again.
I loved my friends so much. It was so great to see them, especially Michael Stein, David Sherman, Joel Robins, and David Beller. My face hurt from smiling the first half hour. And then I saw The Girl. Except now she was The Divorcee with The Bad Nose Job, The Fake Tits and The Fat Ass. Ain't life grand?
I went to the bar to get a drink to celebrate. Somebody taps me on the shoulder. I turn around. It was Harvey. Thirty-seven years old now, hairline on the run, and looking very upset.
"Are you mad at me? Because it was Joe's father. He was there. Billy, that's all I said. Joe, there's your father. I didn't mean to start nothing."
I said, "Harvey, I'm not mad at you." He didn't seem to hear me.
"Billy, you know, I feel so bad about this. I see you in the movies now and TV. It's so great to see. I'm really--I'm proud of you, man. You're really doing it. Every time you're on TV, my friends are going, 'Hey, Harvey, Billy's on. He's your friend, right?' I go, 'No. He's mad at me.'"
"Harvey, listen to me. I'm not mad at you. I never was. It was my problem."
"You're not mad at me?"
"No," I said.
He looked at me with wonder, a huge sense of relief radiating out of his thirty-seven-year-old face, and then suddenly, he snapped . . .
"Fuck you then! For twenty years I thought you were mad at me and you're not mad at me? Pick up a goddamn phone! Let me off the fucking hook! And you know what else? You don't look so fucking Mah-velous! Fuck you!"
After the reunion, everybody came back over to the house, just like the old days. And my mother cooked for everybody, just like the old days. All of these friends, who had come into this house as young kids to listen to The 2,000 Year Old Man album or to watch a Yankee game or to listen to a great jazz album, were back, only now they were middle-aged people, showing my mother pictures of their kids. They were just as happy to see her as they were to see me. She even remembered their nicknames.
One of my friends is the head of medicine at a very big hospital in Southern California. He lectures around the world on these breakthroughs that he's making in oncology. He's a genius, and a very important man. When my mom heard what he was doing, she said, "Stinky, that's fantastic." We all laughed so hard. The living room was alive again.
So many stories in that house . . . so many stories. We grew up there. We measured our heights on the side of the den door in pencil every six months. We ate great food there. We laughed there . . . We made people laugh there. We were the Nairobi Trio there. We watched Sid Caesar there. I saw the Beatles there. We were Yankees there . . . We fell in love there. We brought our own kids there to get Mom's recipes . . . We mourned there. It was our house . . . So many stories.
CHAPTER 12
The last story would start on Halloween night of 2001. Once again, the entire country had the otherness. Our family was still reeling from the loss of Uncle Milt in late July, and Uncle Berns was having a very difficult time. He had fallen ill at Jenny's wedding the previous S
eptember, and Janice and I spent many months in New York, supervising his care. He was having trouble walking, and he had many other serious problems. I wouldn't let anything happen to him. He became my eighty-seven-year-old son. On September 4, of 2001, exhausted, we finally moved him and my Aunt Deborah into a brand-new assisted-living facility, which was just two blocks from the World Trade Center. Only a high school football field separated them.
A week later, the world changed. We were back in Los Angeles, paralyzed with fear, not only for him, but also for our younger daughter, Lindsay, who was living in New York. We were on the phone with Berns, watching the television coverage as the second tower fell. The phone went dead. I screamed a sound that had never come out of my mouth before. Berns was in a wheelchair, his legs had failed him months before, and I couldn't help feeling that the towers had fallen on his building.
Lindsay was living in the East Village, and watched the towers fall from the roof of her building. She had the same terrifying thoughts we had: Berns is there!
The only way we could communicate was to instant-message on our computers. She wrote, "I have to get to Uncle Berns," and the sweet-sounding tone went off, making the whole thing even more surreal . . .
I wrote back, "Stay where you are. We don't know what this is. There is another plane in the air."
Lindsay finally got through to the front desk of Berns's building and found out that the police and firemen had evacuated all the senior residents, and that they were safe.
The events of the day, and the terrible days after, were just overwhelming, emotionally, physically, spiritually. We knew our world would never be the same. A few weeks after that, one of our closest friends, Dick Schaap, the sports journalist, became terminally ill from complications following hip surgery. It was a dark time for us, the shadows were everywhere.
But on this Halloween night, the ghosts and goblins were just kids on the street as I passed them on my way to Game Four of the World Series. That was an odd Series, the Diamondbacks versus the Yankees. It was the only World Series that the country actually wanted the Yankees to win, just so something good would happen to our city after what had happened to us all a month and a half earlier. I was getting onto the West Side Highway just seconds from Ground Zero, near where I live now, and my cell phone went off. It was my brother Joel.
700 Sundays Page 9
