Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  “It’s more honest for the studios, too, isn’t it?” I asked. “They don’t have to take a chance on the fact that maybe I’ll write a good script. They can read the finished script—take it or leave it. It ain’t a pig in a poke.”

  “You’re too ornery for your own good,” Guy said. “You oughta be out making nice instead of carrying knives around with you. That’s what screenwriters do.”

  The two houses were close together, and she was my father’s neighbor, divorced, raising her two little boys.

  I had met her once on a previous visit to my father as she stood in her front yard, pruning her roses.

  On this visit I ran into her at a friendly bar called Nighttown not far from my father’s house. It was humid and sticky outside and we had a couple of cold beers together, then started chasing them with shots of tequila.

  She asked me about Hollywood and I could tell she read the tabloids: What was Sylvester Stallone really like? Did everybody in Hollywood really do drugs? Was it true that so-and-so was gay? Was it true that I had made millions writing screenplays?

  When Nighttown closed she asked me if I wanted to have “one for the road” at her house—a very short road because I was sleeping at my father’s house that night.

  We had another and another in her dark living room, then went back to the cold beer because her house wasn’t air-conditioned. Her little boys were asleep.

  After a while we went up to her bedroom and couldn’t wait to get our clothes off because we were so sweaty.

  A light went on in my father’s house and as I made love to her I looked out the window and saw my father sitting there in the blistering heat of his own bedroom—bare-chested and sweating and staring off at nothing.

  Afterward she told me that she saw my father sitting there and staring all the time.

  We slept for a couple of hours and one of her little boys woke up and she told me I had to go. I kissed her goodbye, got dressed, went downstairs quietly, and used my key to open the door to my father’s house.

  I went upstairs and he was still sitting in the chair, slumped back. He was asleep. I kissed him on the top of his head and glanced out the window and saw her.

  She had her little boy in her arms. She was rocking him back and forth. She saw me looking at her and turned her light off.

  CHAPTER 5

  [Flashback]

  Commies in Klevland

  KARCHY

  Hey, Pop, how come you still call yourself Dr. Jonas?

  KARCHY’S FATHER

  I still doctor.

  KARCHY

  No you’re not. That’s old-country stuff. You don’t work in a hospital or anything.

  KARCHY’S FATHER

  I doctor law, got Ph.D. degree in Hungary. I doctor.

  KARCHY

  It doesn’t mean anything over here. Nobody cares.

  KARCHY’S FATHER

  I care. It mean something … to me.

  Telling Lies in America

  PRIESTS MET US at the railroad station in Klevland and drove us through the dark streets. It was late at night in the winter. Mounds of snow covered the ground.

  They stopped at a building next to a building with a large neon sign and led us up a long stairway into an apartment with no furniture. Bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. There was no heat.

  We lay down on the floor in our coats. There was no food. My mother cried and smoked a cigarette.

  I clutched my cowboy guns.

  The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a tiny office for my father.

  The priests, who were Franciscans like Father Benedek and Father Ipoly but younger, brought us some furniture. I slept on a couch in the living room. There was a small concrete yard in the back between our apartment and the printing shop where the newspaper was set into type and printed. I played there and in a private alleyway that ran on the side of our apartment. Beneath us was the newspaper’s circulation office, where more priests sat.

  I ran around the concrete yard and the alley firing my guns at the priests.

  Our address was 4160 Lorain Avenue, which was also the address of the newspaper my father was going to edit, the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday.

  Since the paper’s printing shop was behind our apartment, the smell of burning lead was pervasive. Also filling the air was the smell of burning potatoes: the Num Num Potato Chip factory, a tall red-brick building, was on the other side of our apartment.

  We were at the epicenter of Cleveland’s West Side Hungarian neighborhood. Right out our living room window to the left was Papp’s Bar … across the street was the Korona Kavehaz, also known as the Crown Café … down the street were the Debrecen Restaurant, Sarosi Dry Cleaners, Gerzeny Movers, Sam Finesilver’s Hardware Store, and the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home.

  Lorain Avenue was a main artery furnishing Hungarian goods to people who worked at Republic or U.S. Steel and stayed close to other Hungarians in what they called their “strudel ghetto.” There were 150,000 Hungarians in Cleveland living mostly in blue-collar neighborhoods whose boundaries were populated by Puerto Ricans, Appalachians, Irish, German, and black residents. To either side of Lorain Avenue were old streets with little houses intersected by an intricate, mazelike network of dark and garbage-strewn back alleys.

  The focal point of the West Side Hungarian community was the church, St. Emeric’s, behind the block-long West Side Market on West 25th Street, sixteen blocks from our new home.

  I was enrolled at St. Emeric’s, the Hungarian-American grade school. The teachers were Hungarian nuns in black clothes, the Daughters of the Divine Redeemer. The school was attached to the parish, whose pastor was Father John Mundweil. A gruff man in his forties, he scowled a lot. Even the sisters were afraid of him.

  The school grounds were at the edge of a bluff overlooking the city’s flats. From the field at the edge of the bluff, you could see a river—the Cuyahoga—flowing between the factories. The river smelled of sulfur and chemicals. The closer you got to it, the more it stung your eyes.

  The river made me cry.

  · · ·

  My mother walked me to school on my first day. I wore my cowboy outfit.

  It was the last time I wore it. One of the other kids knocked my hat off at recess and stomped on it and when my mother arrived to walk me back from school, my fancy vest and pants were covered with mud.

  Because the nuns and most of the kids in school … kids named Csaba and Tibor and Geza and Gyuszi and Arpi … were Hungarian, I couldn’t get away with not saying or doing anything like I had in Washington.

  I hated school.

  The Daughters of the Divine Redeemer, who taught mostly in Hungarian, were scary. If you didn’t know an answer … if you misbehaved … they slapped you … pulled your hair … hit your hands with a ruler … pulled your pants down and hit you with a paddle … said you were going to burn forever in hell … said they’d call the police to take you to jail … said they’d tell Immigration to take you back to the old country.

  Sister Rose told us that America, like our school, was named after St. Emeric, Hungary’s heroic Prince Emeric, St. Stephen’s son. The Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci was baptized after Hungary’s St. Emeric. Not only did it mean that America was named after a Hungarian, it meant that had St. Emeric not lived, there would not be a place called America.

  Only thanks to Hungary was there an America!

  Shortly after we arrived, the circulation office of the newspaper downstairs was burgled.

  All that was taken, I heard my father tell my mother, were files the Franciscans had kept about the things my father had achieved in Hungary.

  My father said it was the Komchis … coming after him.

  They were afraid of the Komchis in another way, too. They mentioned the names of Hungarian men … who’d been sent back to the Komchis … back to Hungary … by America.

  I asked why America would send Hungarians back to the Komchis and was told that there were K
omchis everywhere, even in America.

  I was frightened, too. I was afraid that one morning I’d wake up to find that the Komchis had taken my father away. I stood at the living room window which faced our street—Lorain Avenue—with my cowboy guns in hand, looking for Komchis.

  I didn’t see any but one day I saw two Hungarians yelling at each other outside Papp’s Bar, talking of course about the horse’s cock that would enter their behinds. Then I saw one of the men take a knife out of his coat and push it into the other’s stomach.

  The man fell and blood gushed out of him the way it had gushed out of the pigs at the slaughterhouse. I stared until I heard the siren that was getting closer and closer.

  When it got very close, I ran into the bathroom and covered my ears.

  Rats were in the alley and the concrete yard but, probably because the Franciscans placed traps in the stairs, there were no rats in our apartment.

  But the building next door to ours was the Num Num Potato Chip factory and the rats had overrun it. We could see the rats scurrying on the ledges leading to the factory windows.

  An old Franciscan named Father Ákos collected the trapped rats in the yard and in the alley every morning. He took them to a shed behind the printing shop where he grilled and smoked them.

  My father said Father Ákos came from a part of Hungary called Transylvania. And that this was a custom there.

  My father had what he called a green card. It was very important, I heard, because if you didn’t have one you couldn’t be in America.

  My mother took my father’s pants to Sarosi Dry Cleaners across the street and left his wallet in the pants. The green card was inside the wallet. First my mother and then my father went to Sarosi, but Sarosi said there was no wallet in the pants.

  My parents were desperate. I heard my father say that he was afraid to go back to the Immigration and tell them he’d lost his green card. My mother prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost objects.

  A week later the mailman brought my father’s wallet with the green card in it. Someone had taken the few dollars inside and put the wallet in a mailbox.

  The Franciscans paid my father $100 a month plus the apartment. I didn’t know how very little this was but I knew it was little because I heard my mother saying, “How will we be able to buy food and clothes for the boy?”

  I went with my mother as she shopped. Two-day-old bread at Timar’s Bakery, fruit and vegetables hardly spoiled at the West Side Market. We ate soup often and eggs, Spam, hot dogs, cans of sardines, and rice with hot milk and raisins.

  We had an icebox that we couldn’t keep in the kitchen because the kitchen was too small. So we kept it at the top of the stairway leading to the apartment. It was mostly empty.

  Every day, as my mother walked me to school through the outdoor stands of the West Side Market, an Italian fruit vendor threw me a shiny red apple and said, “Heer ya go, Joee!”

  On days when the West Side Market wasn’t open, the outdoor stand area—which my mother and I had to walk through to get to St. Emeric’s—was overtaken by bums. As my mother was walking me to school, we saw a bum by a dumpster, looking at us and laughing. His pants were open. He had his pimpli in his hand and was pulling it.

  When my mother saw what he was doing, she picked me up and we ran away.

  I woke up on my living room couch and heard my parents moving around quickly in the darkness. I grabbed my cowboy guns. My mother shushed me.

  Someone was at the top of the stairway by the icebox. My father was standing by the door. We heard whispering voices out there. We heard the icebox door open and close. Then we heard footsteps going down the stairs and footsteps again at the private alley at the side of our apartment. We ran to the living room window and watched them as they came out of the alley.

  A man and a woman, nicely dressed, carrying a brown bag. They walked to a car and drove away. The next morning we discovered that they had taken a package of hot dogs from the icebox.

  “The Komchis,” my father said.

  “But why?” my mother asked.

  “To let me know they’re watching me.”

  My mother said, “Maybe it was just two people from the bar who were drunk and hungry.”

  My father said, “Mária, you saw them. They weren’t drunk. They were nicely dressed. They had a car. Why would they take our frankfurters?”

  The Komchis stole everything in Hungary, my mother said. They broke into the poorest and the richest homes. They stole anything and everything.

  They told men to take their pants off but let them keep the jackets they didn’t want. Or they took the jackets and let them keep the pants they didn’t want. Or in some cases, they took both the jacket and the pants and even underwear or even socks or eyeglasses.

  They had machines which beeped when they found gold or silver. They opened people’s mouths, and if they had gold teeth, they pulled them out with pliers.

  I was happy I didn’t have any gold teeth!

  Rákosi was one of the most evil Komchis, my mother told me. He had worked for Béla Kun, the Komchi who had hung people on the lampposts when my father was a boy.

  I saw pictures of him. He was a big, fat, bald man. My father said he had been in a Hungarian prison for years, but had then been released and exchanged for some flags the Russkis had stolen from Hungary many years before.

  This, my father said, had been a very big mistake. Now Hungary had a Communist flag.

  Rakosi, my mother said, had a gang of evil men who helped him hang people, put them in jail, and torture them with rubber hoses, pliers, and burning cigarettes applied to their eyelids and armpits.

  Their names were Ernö Gerö and Jozsef Révai and Zoltán Vas and Mihály Farkas. All of them, my mother said, were Zsidos.

  My father told me when we were alone that this Mihály Farkas began his days by peeing into the mouths of prisoners.

  I told my father that my mother said that the gang were all Zsidos like Rákosi and Béla Kun.

  My father said, “Your mother is right. But the fact that they are Zsidos doesn’t matter.”

  The rapes were the worst, my father said. Many of the Russki Komchis were sick in their pimplis. Their pimplis had big boils and were full of pus.

  When they stuck it into the women, the boils and pus grew inside them. The women sometimes killed themselves so they wouldn’t feel the boils and the pus in there.

  Bishop Vilmos Apor was a great Hungarian hero. He hid women in the church cellar so they wouldn’t get the boils and the pus. When the Komchis came to the church, Bishop Apor stood in front of the cellar door. The Komchis shot him. Then they opened the cellar door, opened their pants, and did their boiling and pusing.

  I was happy my pimpli didn’t have boils or pus.

  The man I kept hearing about—from my parents, the Franciscans, my father’s friends—was Cardinal Mindszenty, the Hungarian saint.

  He was in a Komchi prison in Hungary now, being tortured. He had already been beaten with a rubber hammer between his legs and on the soles of his feet, kept awake for months, and forced to wear a clown costume every day.

  I asked if his fingernails had been torn out with pliers and if Mihály Farkas had pee-peed into his mouth.

  I asked if the Komchi women had forced him to put his pimpli into the boils and pus inside them.

  My mother got angry at me and told me to stop asking such stupid questions.

  I didn’t think they were stupid.

  · · ·

  I was sick in bed a lot with endless tonsillitis and fevers and nosebleeds—the result, the Hungarian doctors said, of vitamin deficiencies and the rickets I’d had in the camps.

  I was thin as a toothpick, freckled everywhere, with overgrown fly-away ears. My carrot-colored crew cut was especially bizarre. Our Slovak barber, for some reason, had shaved the widow’s peak atop my forehead.

  Bristly little wartlike hairs grew there!

  I was learning English at St. Emeric’s
quickly. When I first played kovboys and Indians with my classmates at recess, I spoke mostly Hungarian, then after a while, smattering the Hungarian with English words.

  When we spoke English—Steve Wegling and Paulie Szabo and David Markovics and Willi Krassoi and I—we spoke with Hungarian accents. When we played bazball and Yook-Yook, a game where we tried to hit each other with a rubber ball, we’d call each other’s names in Hungarian, then switch to English.

  Jozsi, gotcha!

  My father asked me to accompany him sometimes on an errand. I knew hardly any English; I was picking some up.

  We went inside a furniture store where he had seen a desk in the window.

  The man inside said, “Thirty dollars.”

  My father said, “Five dollar!”

  The man started yelling, “Fok you!” He called us bums and DPs and greenhorns.

  My father said, “Ten dollar!”

  The man yelled, “Get the fok out of here!”

  We left.

  It was the first time I’d heard that word. I didn’t know what it meant. When we were out on the street, I saw the tears welling in my father’s eyes. I understood his humiliation.

  I’ve been wanting to say this to that man at the Polster Furniture store on Lorain Avenue for fifty years. I know what it means now.

  No, fok you! Fok you!

  I saw an old Gypsy violinist who played next door at Papp’s Bar on weekends walking slowly down the street, inspecting the gutter. He was drunk.

  “Sanyi Bácsi,” I said to him, “what are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing, boy? I’m looking for the gold.”

  “What gold?” I said.

  “You must be a very dumb boy,” he said. “Don’t you know that in America the streets are paved with gold?”

  He cackled and slapped me on the shoulder.

  Then he picked a cigarette butt up from the gutter and lit it. He took a satisfying drag and smiled.

  “You see, boy?” he said, laughing. “It’s true. I have found the gold.”

  At the same time I was learning to read English at St. Emeric’s my mother taught me to read Hungarian at home. We sat at the kitchen table and read about King Mátyás and St. Stephen’s Holy Crown and St. Stephen’s Preserved and Uncorrupted Holy Right Hand. Every time I made a mistake, my mother slapped me. They were casually administered and hard slaps that hurt. Sometimes during the course of a lesson, she’d hit me ten times.