Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  This was on my day off, and it was raining, and I decided not to drive to The City. I went to the Y early in the morning, had a long workout. I was getting ready to leave, but a full-court basketball game was being organized. They were short one person, me. So I got into it. The game got heated. We lost, just barely. Hey, let’s have another. It was one of those lunatic things that catches you in its vortex and doesn’t let go. Tennis would be out. It was a marathon basketball session, group insanity. Finally it ended, but I couldn’t let go. I did some more exercises, had a swim. Don’t ask me why. Then I stepped on the scale. I had weighed in at 209 that day, I weighed out at 199, first time I’d been below 200 since I was 14. Oh my God. This deserves a reward.

  I called Buscaglia’s in Jackson, one of the gold country towns. They had a family-style lunch, seven days a week. Meatballs, lasagna, veal chops, just load up.

  “How late do you serve the lunch?”

  “You come, we’ll stay open for you,” Mrs. Buscaglia said. Oh boy.

  I ate from about 3 p.m. until 7. Next day when I checked into the Y, the scale registered 212.

  Nick and his wife and his friends became my social set. I’ve never been a clubby type, but that didn’t seem to matter. Everything was fairly loose and relaxed, California style. Except for something that happened one night, and I’ve puzzled over it for many years.

  There was a man named Mike with whom I’d play tennis occasionally. I’d heard that he’d played football at Cal, and he certainly was big enough, naturally big before the days of heavy weight training, massive through the chest and shoulders. He was dark complexioned and glowering and he looked like the kind of person you didn’t want to get mad at you. His tennis game was big, crushing forehand, big serve, net game, etc. But the interesting thing was that if you managed to hang with him and return his shots, and maybe do some fluky stuff, spins and drops and whatever, he could be beaten. He’d fold. It was curious.

  When he first heard that I’d gone to Columbia he asked me what years, and when I told him, he said his brother had been a baseball player there. I asked him for the name, and he brushed it off. “Never mind, you wouldn’t have known him,” he said. Again, curious.

  One night we were at Nick’s house for a small party. Mike had had a bit to drink, and all of a sudden, my ears caught the unmistakable sound of anti-Semitic mumblings from him, Jew this and Jew that. Not particularly vicious, but present. I ignored it, and it got worse. Was I the target of this? I was about to say something. I mean, I had to react in some way, but I also had to plan my strategy.

  I went into the kitchen and sat down. How to handle it? I didn’t think a conversation would do it. Things had gone beyond that. But, and this was a definite part of it, he was big, real big, and he looked as if he could handle himself, and me, too. I had to get him quickly, preferably while he was seated, and I had to get him more than once, and then, hopefully, people would jump in and break it up. All this was going through my head as I sat there in Nick’s kitchen. I must have looked a bit weird because Nick came in and immediately said to me, “You’re upset about Mike, aren’t you?” And I said yes.

  “Before you go nuts,” he said, “let me explain a few things to you.”

  First of all, Nick explained, his last name wasn’t the one he gave me, but something a lot longer and more ethnic. Second of all … well, I wasn’t the only Jew in the room. I was stunned. And then it hit me. It all fell into place, the way he would fold when you put it to him on the tennis court, the reason why he wouldn’t identify his brother. And I felt this tremendous wave of sadness. All this trouble to hide it, to live a lie, the anguish he must have gone through every day. All the aggression was gone. I just felt very sorry for Mike. I made my excuses and left. I’ve often wondered what ever happened to him.

  Nick and his family, his wife Gerry, whom he’d coached well enough for her to win the Central Cal women’s tournament one year, his three girls, all of whom were ranked at one time, remained friends for many years, even after I left Sacramento. He was an unusual person. When he played the circuit, he was called the Bad Boy of Tennis. He worked as a cab driver in San Francisco and learned how to play on the public courts and wasn’t above a friendly wager or two on his efforts. He had all the psych routines down, taking off the sweater and then putting it on, changing racquets when an opponent was on a streak, changing shoes.

  When I knew him, he was a terrific coach of junior players, and he had a unique trick that always worked.

  “When they’re in a group lesson, and it’s toward the end of the hour and their concentration is flagging,” he told me, “the way you can always bring them back is with money. It doesn’t have to be much. A dime or a quarter will do it. You just tell them, ‘OK, you’re getting 10 backhands to hit, and whoever hits the most on the court gets the quarter.’ And all of a sudden, their concentration’s back.”

  Every time I pass through Vacaville on my trip from Sacramento to San Francisco, I think of a story Nick told me about growing up there. There was a bridge, he said, called The Lion’s Paw Bridge. It got its name from an incident that happened when he was a child. A circus had been going through via railroad. Somehow something jolted the car carrying a lion and the door opened. A male lion escaped and ran into the hills of Vacaville, which was pretty primitive in those days. He established himself with the mountain lions in those hills. He was rarely seen, Nick said, but on warm nights you could hear him roaring.

  One day they were building a bridge over a stream where the lions would come to drink in the evening. The cement was still wet when the male lion stepped in it, leaving a paw print that remained. Hence, The Lion’s Paw Bridge. I never met anyone who verified that story, but I don’t care … l loved it so much. The second story of Nick’s is even better.

  When he was very young and working in San Francisco, he married a flaming redhead, just as I did many years later, only she had the temper to go with her hair. He said the fights they had were explosive.

  “Once she came after me with a kitchen knife,” he said. Finally they split up. They’d had a son. She remarried a businessman named McCarthy who wanted to do the right thing for the family, the right thing being giving the boy a decent upbringing and education — provided Nick relinquish the rights to him.

  “I was struggling to make a living,” Nick said. “I did it.”

  He didn’t see him again, for maybe 15 years.

  “Then one day,” Nick said, “when I was a teaching pro, I came into the pro shop after a lesson, and this tall young guy is sitting there. He’d been waiting for me. He just stared at me when I came in. I stared at him.

  “‘You’re Neil,’ I said. He nodded. He’d left home, left McCarthy and his mother.

  “‘I’ve come to stay with you,’ he said. I called his mother, my ex-wife.

  “‘He wouldn’t give me any peace,’ she said. ‘He kept saying, ‘I know this isn’t my father. I’m nothing like him. You’ve got to tell me who my real father is.’ I couldn’t stand it anymore, so finally I told him. And he just left.’

  “So I brought him home,” Nick said. “The girls got all excited. ‘We’ve got a brother! We’ve got a brother!’ After dinner I took him down to the basement to play him a little ping pong. I let him win one, let him win another, came from behind and beat him. We put some money on it. He got all excited, wouldn’t let me leave, just the way I used to be. Then I really beat him. I kept saying, ‘You can’t be my son. It’s not possible. How could I have a pigeon for a son?’”

  So Neil McCarthy enrolled at Sacramento State, played basketball and eventually wound up head coach at New Mexico State. Once I told the story to my mother, who loved tales like that. She always used to tell me stories of the old country and gypsies who put curses on people and that kind of thing.

  “Look at my hand,” she said. “It’s shaking. That story makes me shake.”

  I ha
d a lovely way of life in Sacramento. The living was easy, so easy that it scared me. I can work here and grow old here and die here, and nobody ever would have heard of me. I had reverted to a New York way of thinking. Then Bob Stewart of the New York World-Telegram told me to come back and write schoolboy sports for them. My co-workers on the sports staff gave me a Duncan Hines Guide to Dining Out in the U.S. as a going away present, and I planned my trip accordingly in an attempt to gain back all the weight I had lost.

  I found a two-room apartment on West 106th St. for $75 a month, a step up from my North Sacramento duplex, but then again, I was making more money, too, something like $98 a week. What killed me about living in the city was not being able to find a parking spot for my Volkswagen, at least not a legitimate one. Not being able to park near your home would have been unheard of in Sacramento.

  But in New York, it was a way of life: the endless circling, block after block, finally parking a little too close to a hydrant or just shading into the bus stop area. It just struck me as so unfair. So as a protest, I let the parking tickets pile up (they weren’t serious into towing in those days). The payoff came years later, when I wound up in the court on Centre St., with a massive fine on the books. If you pay by check, you go into a little room, while they call the bank. If they’re told it’ll clear, you can go home. If not, you don’t get out of that room on your own. I made it — just barely.

  The Telly was on Barclay St. in lower Manhattan. My first day in the office, I was introduced around, and we had lunch in the telephone building across the street, myself and the desk guys, including an old timer named Eddie Murphy, who was close to 80 and nearly blind. It was cafeteria-style, and I was still in my Sacramento health foods mode, so loaded my plate with fresh fruit and yogurt and some raw vegetables. Eddie stared at it. He sniffed. He moved for a closer look.

  “What did you do, lose a bet?” He said.

  It was summer, so I worked the night desk until the high schools began. I’d write headlines, read copy, write cut lines, the same stuff I’d done, off and on. The best overline for a picture that I ever wrote was not used. I’m still bitter about it. Del Webb, co-owner of the Yankees, had just gotten married, and we ran a picture of him and his wife stepping off the plane. My kicker line was: “Newlywebbs.”

  Marty O’Shea, the assistant night editor, killed it. Demeaning, he said. I begged, pleaded. No dice.

  Around midnight every shift, a welcome figure would arrive, John Condon, the publicist from Madison Square Garden. He’d arrive with his regular bribes for the night-side guys, the real power elite who could get stuff into the paper. Sandwiches from the Stage Deli, big ones, huge, just the things you dream of. A big cheer would go up when John arrived. Talk about smart PR men. He got just about anything he wanted in the paper.

  The night sports editor was Sal Gerage, a young guy who had gone to Seward Park High School with Bernie Schwartz, a.k.a Tony Curtis, the actor. A brilliant desk man, that was Sal, with a real flair for nicknames. Phil Pepe, who’d been the schoolboy writer before me, was Bugs Bunny, for his prominent front teeth. Bill Bloom, the tiny little man who wrote horse racing, was The Japanese Admiral. I was Tarzan. I think I was the only one who actually liked my nickname.

  I was the new guy, so I would get the clunkier stuff to copyread. Keeping awake was a problem. I figured that working at night, sleeping during the day would be an open invitation to spend my days at Jones Beach, snoozing under the sun. It didn’t quite work out. Sleeping on the beach is fine in theory but not for real. It takes about three hours to get 40 minutes sleep. The slightest noise will wake you, and you were always edgy about not getting caught in traffic, going or coming.

  I’d be tired coming in to work, even more so when my parade of clunkers would start. First there was Larry Robinson on golf. Not really too bad, but if you’d be eating a piece of toast while you were reading it, you might choke to death. Then came Lou Miller on the trotters, and my head would start nodding. Zander Hollander on yachting would almost finish me; my eyes would barely focus on the copy. And the coup de grace was always George Coleman on the horse shows. Clunk! My head would hit the desk.

  “Hey, wake up, Zim. You’ve got copy to move.”

  I’d been there about two weeks when I discovered a wonderful thing. Night clubs were very big in New York, back then in 1960. The Telly covered hundreds of them, thousands. There were always a couple of night club reviews in the paper every day. Midtown New York, little joints in the Village, in Brooklyn, Queens, yes, there was something to say about each one. A curious thing was that the pieces carried bylines of many different people. How big was the staff, anyway?

  Then I found out that anyone could cover a nightclub. Just had to ask. You got no pay for it, but you were comped on food and drink for you and a companion. You could praise the show, rip it, whatever. They didn’t care. Just mentioning it was the thing. Wow! Talk about planning a sensational date. I mean, you could interview any of the performers. “My date, the night club reviewer.”

  I became a regular. Never in my life had I had such an assortment of dates … budding actresses, a Jantzen swimsuit model, you name it. Then one day Robin Terkel, our guild rep, talked to the entertainment department and demanded that we get paid for our reviews. Now I’m a strong union man, always have been, but … “Jesus, Robin, just leave it alone, OK? We’re doing fine.” Nope, fair’s fair, he said. No overtime, no night club coverage. Fine, said management. Goodbye and good luck to the sweetest deal anyone ever had.

  You’ve never seen so many dates abandon a human being in your life. They were like rats leaving the sinking ship. “Uh, can I speak to Laura, please?” “Well. Laura isn’t here right now … no, I don’t know when she’ll be back … I’ll tell her you called.”

  I decided to concentrate on what was at hand. There was a young lady who wrote for the society page who was just as sweet looking as her name. Lilla Lyon. A blonde, not exactly willowy, in fact slightly on the robust side, but that was fine. She was a society girl herself, I was told. I didn’t get very far there, I’m afraid. Not that she wasn’t always pleasant.

  I remember one night, Joe King, our pro football writer, was in the office late, writing his story. Case of Heineken’s on one side, pack of cigarettes on the other, that was Joe, banging out his piece on the Giants. I was in there doing some high school wrap up or something, and Lilla had been covering a society ball, and she walked by our little sports alcove. Joe looked up.

  “Wanna beer?” he asked her.

  “I’d love one,” she said. He started opening a Heineken.

  “Oh, a beer?” she said. “I thought you said a pear.”

  “A pear?” Joe said, looking confused. “A pear?”

  He left the office. A couple of blocks away, the Washington Market, one of the great produce centers in New York, was just swinging into life. Fifteen minutes later, Joe came back, followed by a young, sweating produce worker in an undershirt. He carried on his shoulder a case of pears.

  “Right over there,” Joe said, pointing to Lilla’s desk. The guy put down the case and left. Lilla was dumbfounded. Joe tipped his hat and came back to his typewriter to finish his story.

  “You see that?” He said to me. “That’s the way you do it.”

  I started dating one of the copygirls named Barbara. One weekend she invited me up to her parents’ house in Westport, Conn. When we arrived her mother suggested we go for a swim in the ocean. Fine with me. I gave it the old Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, charging into the waves. Smush! The first one hit me in the face. And knocked out my front tooth. Not a real tooth, you understand, a fake one that you could take out and put in again. It was called a flipper. The real one had been knocked out years ago.

  I tried diving for it. The water was murky. I dove and dove.

  “What are you doing over there?” Barbara yelled at me. “Oh, nothing, nothing.”

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sp; I never found it. And now it was time to go in for dinner. I was introduced to her father.

  “You work in sports, huh?” he said. I said yes, careful to keep my lips tightly drawn. “I like to read Joe Val,” he said. Joe Val was our racing handicapper.

  “Joe’s a real nice guy,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “Joe Val isn’t a real person. It’s a pseudonym.”

  “Well, maybe he’s not a real person, but I had lunch with him yesterday.”

  He repeated his same litany, almost word for word. “You don’t understand … Joe Val isn’t a real person,” etc. I mean, could somebody really be this dumb?

  “Look,” I said, “you might not believe this, but Joe Val …” I was getting a little hot, and then I noticed that they were all staring at the gap where my tooth should have been, father, mother, Barbara, her brother. I had gotten carried away.

  Barbara told me that later, her mother had said to her, “Please, dear, don’t ever bring that young man here again.” That was the beginning of the end of that romance.

  I had a great time covering schoolboy sports. I had to pick an All-Met football team every year, encompassing the city and the huge surrounding area of Westchester County, metropolitan New Jersey and Long Island. I was always on the road, seeing games live, watching films with the coaches, scouting practices. I had huge books of charts. In short, I was doing what I later did in my NFL coverage for all those years and I was in dog heaven.

  After the season we threw a dinner at Mamma Leone’s on 48th St. for our All-Mets. Larry Robinson, who covered college football as well as golf, got college players to attend and sit with the kids, Joe King got Giants, Larry Fox got Titans from the AFL. The entertainment section got a comic to come and entertain every year. The best was Bill Cosby. The kids loved him, but when we tried to tell him afterward how much we appreciated his coming there, he turned his back and told his agent, “Let’s get out of here.” Ah, well.