The Indians had a player I liked as much as the now departed Roger Maris. His name was Rocky Colavito. He was a home run hitter. He was exciting to watch. He’d put the bat over his shoulders, stretch his muscles, point his cap, step up to bat, and a lot of times hit a home run. The whole city was excited about him.
The Indians traded him.
Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t on TV or on the radio anymore. His songs were out of the jukebox at the Royal Castle. The Plain Dealer said preachers were putting his records into stacks and burning them. All because he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin.
Even Elvész Prezli was gone, off the radio and the TV and out of the jukeboxes. In Germany, in the army, his ducktail gone, too, wearing a crew cut, signing autographs on the breasts of Nazis now probably.
My portable radio broke. A kid at Cathedral Latin named Jack Harrison knocked it out of my hand as I was putting it into my locker.
I hit him in the mouth. A brother started screaming at me and took me to the principal’s office.
The principal took a file out of a drawer, studied it, and looked at me.
“Mr. Eszterhas,” he said, pronouncing it right, “if you’re ever brought into this office again for something like this, I will expel you from Cathedral Latin.”
“He started it,” I said.
“I don’t care who started it,” the priest said. “I won’t care who started it. Do you understand me?”
I said, “Yes, Father.”
I took the radio home and was trying to tape it together.
“What happened to it?” my father asked.
“I dropped it,” I said.
“How?”
“It just fell out of my hands.”
“Clumsy of you,” my father said.
I looked at him. He was looking into my eyes.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe I can help you fix it,” he said.
Even my mother helped. That shocked me because she had to touch the tubes which she believed emitted the rays that tortured her. We taped it together with black electrical tape, all three of us, and it worked.
“You see,” my father said, “I am a genius!”
“You did nothing,” my mother said, “I fixed it.”
“We did it together.” My father smiled.
After I broke Jack Harrison’s teeth, none of the other kids at Cathedral Latin shoved me or flicked my ears or knocked things from my hands.
They just pretended I wasn’t there.
The brothers ignored me, too, and hardly called on me in class.
One of them, though, said to the class, “Look, gentlemen, Mr. Esterhose has a new haircut today. Doesn’t he look handsome?”
I didn’t much look forward to Christmas.
“You’re older now,” my father said. “You know that everything costs money. You know that we don’t have much money. So from now on I will ask you what you want for Christmas each year and then we will discuss it. We will find out how much it costs and if it’s too expensive, I will ask you to pick something else. That way you’ll be helping us with the money.
“So,” my father said, “what do you want for Christmas this year?”
I said, “Nothing.”
I got nothing and they got nothing for each other, either.
I was seeing my father less.
We weren’t playing much of our button soccer game. He was going out at night often again. He was taking a political science night course at Case Western Reserve University and a drawing course at an art school.
“I have to try to make more money,” he said to me. “Maybe I can teach political science somewhere. Maybe I can draw things and sell them to the magazines.”
He kept his drawings in a big case that was always tied together. Alone in the apartment one day, I opened it. All I saw were drawings of naked women.
When my mother was in the printing shop downstairs, I asked my father why he only drew naked women.
“How do you know I draw only naked women?” he asked.
I shrugged and he glanced at his case and knew.
“The course I am taking at the art school is called figure sketching,” he said. “There is a model sitting there naked and the students draw her.”
“She is naked sitting right there?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s what models do.”
“Can I learn figure sketching, too?” I asked.
He laughed. “Whatever you do, don’t tell your mother,” he said. “She doesn’t know what I’m drawing.”
I didn’t tell her and he hid his case filled with his drawings in the same tiny alcove where I had hidden my discarded sandwiches.
My mother found them.
My father stopped going to art school.
I discovered Joseph Conrad and Turgenev and Hawthorne and I kept reading Steinbeck. I realized that there were people in America who were even poorer than we were. And I realized from reading Steinbeck that there were Komchis, Reds, who spent their lives trying to help these poor people. I didn’t say anything to my father, though, about the good Komchis I was reading about.
Conrad particularly interested me. He was Polish, an immigrant who’d lived in England. Polish was his mother tongue. He couldn’t even speak English until he was in his forties. For the rest of his life, he spoke it with a pronounced accent. And yet he had learned to write in English so well that he was a world-famous, immortal writer.
I discovered a whole new world on television: boxing. My new heroes were Archie Moore, the Old Mongoose, who ate steaks by spitting them out and swallowing only the juice … Floyd Patterson, who played peekaboo with his gloves as he fought … Carmen Basilio, whose face looked like raw meat at the end of a fight … Joey Giardello, a brawler who sometimes hit below the belt.
When Ingemar Johannson and his right hand of “Toonder” knocked Floyd Patterson out, I felt like crying.
My father watched me listen to the fight on the radio and said, “Why do you like people hurting each other?”
I couldn’t answer him.
One of the radio stations, WJW, began a program which I never missed with an announcer named Tom Carson. Tom Carson drove at night in a car with the radio station’s letters on its side and went to the scene of crimes.
He reported from there, live, describing holdups and shootings and bar fights. I listened to Tom Carson prowling the streets of Cleveland every night.
Once he said, “The shooting is at the corner of Fulton and Lorain. I’m at 65th and Lorain now, I should be there in three minutes.”
I ran to the living room window and waited and here he came, right by our window, Tom Carson with the car that said WJW on its side!
As a newspaper reporter in Dayton, Ohio, and in Cleveland, I drove cars with “Journal Herald” and “Plain Dealer” painted on their sides.
When I cracked my own car up in Dayton, I “borrowed” the Journal Herald car and drove it to Cleveland on weekends.
The Plain Dealer car even had a telephone in it and, sometimes, driving through the city, I’d hold the phone to my ear to look important.
Even when there was no one on the line.
The only part of Cathedral Latin I liked was the pep rallies. I had never seen anything like it. All nine hundred of us packed into the gym. All boys. All boy cheerleaders screaming their lungs out: “Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius!” Or “Beat Holy Name! Beat Holy Name! Beat Holy Name!” Or “Let’s Win One for the Purple and Gold!”
It went on until we were red-faced and out of breath, hoarse-voiced, and foaming at the mouth. Even the brothers were foaming at the mouth, waving their fists and screaming.
I took the bus alone to our game against Holy Name High School. I sat alone in the stands rooting … for Holy Name High School.
I heard the best cheer I’ve ever heard anywhere. I heard it from the father of a Holy Name player.
The dad yelled, “Fuck ’em in the belly, Jimmy!”
The m
ost revered people at Cathedral Latin were the jocks, the stars of the pep rallies.
They proudly wore their letter sweaters and made speeches: “What did I say? Beat Ignatius! Who we gonna beat? Ignatius! What are we gonna do? Beat Ignatius!”
The letter sweaters were a snowy white with the letters C and L in purple and gold sewn on them along with your first name. You were awarded the letter sweater by the priests and brothers for achievement.
I resolved that I, Howdy Doody, the Greenhorn, the Asshole, the Creep, would somehow achieve such a Cathedral Latin letter sweater!
I joined the Cathedral Latin Speech and Debate team. My debate partner was a midget. He wasn’t even four feet tall.
We must’ve been a sight—Howdy Doody with a ducktail and his midget sidekick, pontificating about whether or not America should withdraw from the United Nations. One debate we were for it and the next debate we were against it. We never knew which side we would represent until the judge told us.
We couldn’t believe in either position but we had to be persuasive in advocating either position. The midget and I traveled to different high schools, debating the differing sides between ourselves.
Sometimes by the time we got there we were so confused my partner and I argued different positions while debating the other team. But the other team was confused, too, and the same thing happened to them sometimes.
“What kind of foolishness is this?” my father said. “How can you put your soul into both sides of an argument?”
“This is how they do it in America,” I told him.
“They are teaching you,” my father said, “to believe in nothing. They are teaching you to lie expertly. They are teaching you to be American politicians.”
I failed algebra. The brother who failed me was the same one who had said, “Look, Mr. Esterhose is wearing a new pair of pants today.” But he wasn’t wrong to fail me. I was as bad with numbers as my mother was good.
I told this brother I hated numbers.
He said, “Unfortunately, Mr. Esterhose, you need to know about numbers in life. How are you going to keep track of your money in life if you can’t count? How will you be able to pay your taxes?”
I said, “I will be very rich and will pay others to keep track of my money and my taxes.”
“How will you become very rich?” he asked, trying not very successfully to hide a sneer.
“Like Shondor Birns,” I said.
He said, “Who is this?”
I said, “Shondor Birns is a pimp, a gambler, a numbers king, a gangster. A great Hungarian.”
He looked for a moment like he couldn’t believe what I’d said.
Then he smiled and said, “Of course.”
“How could you fail algebra?” my father said. “Now I will have to pay to send you to summer school.”
“Do you know algebra?” I asked him.
“Somewhat.”
“What use has algebra ever been to you in life?”
“That’s not the point,” my father said.
“Was there any moment of your life—ever—when you thought, ‘Oh, I am so happy I know algebra!’?”
My mother spoke up unexpectedly.
“I have worked with numbers,” she said. “I have even worked as a bookkeeper. I don’t know algebra. I never studied algebra.”
“You see?” I said to my father.
“Why are you saying these things to him?” my father said to my mother.
She said to him, “You aren’t right about everything. Sometimes I’m right, too.
“You’re wrong a lot,” my mother said to him. “You’ve been wrong a lot. But no, we never talk about that! Oh, no! You are the great leader! Everybody applauds!”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun and turned back to her stove.
“Look what you started by failing algebra!” my father said to me.
I went to West Tech for summer school—the place were I’d wanted to go to high school—and I saw most of the kids I’d met in the playgrounds and the alleys near Lorain Avenue.
They were kids like me, dressed like me. No one called me names. The teachers pronounced my name as best they could but mostly called me “Joe.” We ate lunch together out on the grass behind the school from brown paper bags. We shared our smokes and an older kid even shared a can of beer with me sometimes. No one flicked my ears; no one knocked things out of my hands.
And when we took the final test, a girl named Marcy Jacobs secretly shared her answers with me, which was the only possible way I could pass algebra.
There was a new kid at Cathedral Latin. His name was R. J. Wilkinson. He wore a Nazi uniform—the black uniform of an SS officer complete with gleaming silver skullheads. He had a black Nazi cap and a flashing cape with swastikas on it.
He was a freak. His face was pale, his skin saggy. He wore thick glasses. He spoke with a lisp and stuttered. He stuttered about Hitler and Jews. He walked into a classroom, looked at the teacher, threw his right arm into the air, and yelled “Sieg Heil!”
I avoided R. J. Wilkinson, but watching him at a pep rally, screaming “Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius!” in his Nazi uniform, his face red and his fist in the air, he looked like he was in his element.
He wasn’t at Cathedral Latin long. Word was that a teacher had ordered him to stop wearing his uniform and Wilkinson had refused.
I told my father there was a kid at Cathedral Latin who came to school each day in a Nazi uniform and he stared at me.
“I told you,” he said, “Americans are crazy.”
Whenever I saw that Bob Hope was going to be on TV, I always watched. He was Cleveland’s most famous native son, besides John D. Rockefeller, of course.
He was in town often—to throw out the first pitch at an Indians opener or to cut the opening day ribbon at the National Air Races. He was sometimes seen at the Theatrical Grill on Short Vincent in the company of Shondor Birns.
Bob Hope on TV always made me laugh, almost as much as Larry of the Three Stooges or Spanky on the Little Rascals. I loved his nose—probably because, from what I could tell, it was even longer than mine.
I wondered if, when he was growing up, the other kids had called him “Schnozz.”
And when I was a famous American screenwriter, I asked Bob Hope that.
“My friends all called me Schnozz,” Bob Hope said.
We were at a party in Beverly Hills thrown by Guy McElwaine, who was also Bob Hope’s agent. I saw that his nose was actually longer than mine and when Guy told him that I, too, was from Cleveland, Bob Hope was so happy that he sat down in a corner with me.
We had a lot of things in common, besides our noses. Schnozz was an immigrant, like me. He came to America from England when he was five. He grew up just down the street from Cathedral Latin—on East 102nd and Euclid. He hung out on the corner of East 105th and Euclid, where I caught the bus to go back home after school each day. He was part of a gang of Irish kids and got into some juvenile trouble. He went to East High School, which was part of the same conference as Cathedral Latin.
He told me that he sold the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the corner of 105th and Euclid and each day John D. Rockefeller stopped in a limousine and bought a copy. One day John D. Rockefeller gave him some advice: “If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand.”
I asked Bob Hope how well he knew Shondor Birns and Schnozz laughed and said, “Shondor Birns! Did I know Shondor Birns? Oh boy did I!”
I told him the story Shondor Birns had told me about the night he made love to Marilyn Monroe.
“Shondor Birns said he made love to every famous woman who came through Cleveland,” Bob Hope told me with a laugh.
“Now if you want to know about Marilyn”—he winked—“I can really tell you about Marilyn.”
We both laughed and Bob Hope said, “You know, she had the most amazing translucent skin. You could just about see the veins under her skin.
“
At certain moments, that is.” And Schnozz winked again.
Our old blue Nash was dead, its transmission left in the street on 28th Street near Bridge Avenue.
My father and I went down to Dunajszky Motors on Lorain Avenue, where all the West Side Hungarians shopped for their used cars. We picked out a light green 1952 Ford, only seven years old, with only fourteen thousand miles showing on the odometer. Old man Dunajszky said it had been owned by a widow lady who hardly ever drove it.
I was fifteen years old, a year away from being able to get a temporary driver’s license, and my father said that he would teach me to drive.
We began slowly, moving back and forth in the parking lot of Fisher Foods when there was no one there. Then he let me take the wheel on small streets like Whitman Avenue. When it was time to use the brake, he yelled “Brake! Brake!” and stomped the floor with his foot, as though he were braking.
He wanted me to use my horn all the time—as I turned, at stop signs, at green lights. “The most important weapon in America with all these crazy Americans is your car horn,” he said. “They know they are crazy, that’s why they use their horns so much. If they are close to you, shout at them with your horn before they shout at you.”
I drove up and down the West Side tooting my horn. My father and I were our own parade. The American drivers looked at us. Sometimes they tooted back at us. Often they waved in the American way—with their middle finger.
My father didn’t know about this American wave with the middle finger. I explained it to him.
“Baszd meg,” I said, “that’s what it means.”
“The pigs!” He laughed. “They wave all the time.”
“Only when we are driving,” I said.
He gave me a look. “How do you say ‘Baszd meg’ in English?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
He practiced it quietly a couple times but it came out “Fucky you.”
The next time I honked and an American waved at us with his middle finger, my father yelled, “Fucky you!”
The American looked at my father, his middle finger held high above the beret on his head … the American stomped on the gas … and got the hell away from us.
The Hungarian old-age home in Chagrin Falls, a rustic Cleveland suburb, held an annual St. Stephen’s Day celebration. My father was the featured speaker.
Hollywood Animal Page 47
